Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Steven Kotler: Master the Impossible | E138

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

Ready to achieve the impossible? In this episode we are talking with Steven Kotler, best-selling author, award-winning journalist and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective, whose mission is to understand the science behind ultimate human performance and use it to train individuals and organizations. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance.While best known for his work on Flow, he also writes about the use of other unique states of consciousness in order to optimize performance. Steven is also the cohost of Flow Research Collective Radio, a top ten iTunes science podcast.  Steven is the author of nine bestselling books, including The Art of Impossible, The Future is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 40 languages, and has appeared in over 100 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, TIME and the Harvard Business Review. In today’s episode, we discuss Steven’s new book The Art of Impossible and take a deep dive into its lessons. Some of which include the definition of “impossible”, Intrinsic versus Extrinsic motivation, and the core pillars of peak performance. We also talk about the importance of learning, why to-do lists are a must, and why reading books is the best ‘return on investment’ for your brain! If you want guidance on how to create clear goals and reach your optimal performance in life, keep listening!  Sponsored by -  Fiverr Business. Get 1 free year and save 10% on your purchase on Fiverr Business with promo code YAP Gusto. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at gusto.com/YAP Notion. Get up to $1,000 off Notion’s team plan by going to notion.com/startups Social Media:  Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Follow Hala on Clubhouse: @halataha Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com Timestamps: 0:30- What is “Flow” According to Steven 1:52- The Art of Impossible and What It’s About 6:15- Steven’s Definition of impossible 10:02- Why Does Motivation Matter? 19:03- Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation 26:12- How Much Autonomy Do We Need? 34:35- Why Mastery is Important 37:04- Why Goal Setting is Important 46:35- Why We Need Grit 50:20- The Importance of Learning 56:37- What Creativity Means to Steven 1:01:21- How Do The Pillars Tie Back to Flow? 1:03:40- Steven’s Secret to Profiting in Life Mentioned In The Episode: Steven’s New Book: https://www.stevenkotler.com/book-pages/the-art-of-impossible Steven’s First Appearance on YAP: https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/32-flow-into-the-future-with-steven-kotler/id1368888880?i=1000445189295 Steven’s Website: https://www.stevenkotler.com/ Flow Research Collective: https://www.flowresearchcollective.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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$0 delivery fee and percentage off discounts subject to older Subjects to Old Minimums and Participating Source. Taxes and other fee still apply. You're listening to YAP, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Halla Taha, and on Young and Profiting Podcast, we investigate a new topic each week and

interview some of the brightest minds in the world. My goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your everyday life, no matter your age, profession or industry. There's no fluff on this podcast, and that's on purpose. I'm here to uncover value from my guests by doing the proper research and asking the right questions. If you're new to the show, we've chatted with the likes of XFBI agents, real estate moguls, self-made billionaires, CEOs,

and bestselling authors. Our subject matter ranges from enhancing productivity, had to gain influence, the art of entrepreneurship, and more. If you're smart and like to continually improve yourself, hit the subscribe button because you'll love it here at Young & Profiting Podcast. This week on YAP, we're chatting with Stephen Kotler. Stephen is a best-selling author, award-winning journalist, and the executive director of the

Flow Research Collective, whose mission is to understand the science behind ultimate human performance. This is Steven's second time on YAP. He first joined his back in episode number 32, flow into the future, and we couldn't be more excited to have him back on for another awesome conversation. Steven's one of the world's leading experts on human performance. While he's best known for his work on flow, he also writes about the use of other unique states of consciousness in order to optimize performance.

He's written nine bestselling books and is the co-host of Flow Research Collective Radio, a top 10 iTunes Science Podcast. In today's episode, we discuss Steven's new book, The Art of Impossible, and take a deep dive into its lessons, some of which include the definition of impossible in Trenzik vs. Extrinsik Motivation, and the core pillars of peak performance. We'll also talk about the importance of learning why to do lists or must and why reading books is the best return on investment for your brain. If you want guidance on how to create clear goals and reach your optimal

performance in life, keep on listening. Hey Stephen, welcome back to Young and Profiting Podcast. Super excited to have you here today. It's good to be with you again. I love it when you're on the show. My listeners love it when you're on the show. You are actually with us back in episode number 32. We talked about flow.

That's called flow into the future. We also had you on a clubhouse episode pretty recently about two months ago, also talking about flow. So for anybody who missed it, why don't we start off with a definition of flow, and then if anybody wants to go really deep, we've got two great episodes on that topic, because today I wanna focus on your new book,

The Art of Impossible. So why don't we start off with a definition of flow? Perfect. Scientists define flow as an optimal state of consciousness. State of consciousness will refill our best and we perform our best. More specifically, it refers to any of those moments of rapt attention, total absorption. You get so focused on what you're doing, so focused on the task and hand, everything else just starts to disappear. Action awareness, they're

going to start to merge, you sense a self-serve consciousness, the voice in your head are going to diminish, time's going to pass strange, that it're going to start to merge you since itself. So, consciousness, the voice in your head are going to diminish. Time's going to pass strange that it's going to speed up five hours of goodbye in like five seconds. Or it'll slow down, you've got a freeze frame effect. You know, you've just been in a car crash. And throughout all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. So, that's flow and not show.

You may call it being the zone or runner's eye or being unconscious. The synonyms are sort of endless. Flow is a scientific term. So we'll all stick with that. Amazing. Amazing. And so from my understanding, your new book, The Art of Impossible, was really a continuation of your research on works like the rise of Superman.

So talk to us about how the art of impossible is an extension of that research and what's different about that book than the previous ones. So most of the previous books where I've written about flow, first of all, I've looked at flow from a lot of different aspects. West to Jesus looks at the relationship between flow and mystical experiences. Stealing fire looks at flow and in relationship to other altered states of consciousness,

et cetera, et cetera, I've done a bunch of that. This is the first time I've written how to book. So it's the first playbook I've ever written. But more importantly, and this is how it builds. And I got a slightly longer answer. Back in the 1990s, when people first started trying to train other people in flow, they were depending on psychology. We had psychological definitions of flow. We had a psychological understanding of it. And as a general rule, people were lousy using what we use psychologically to train flow. Over the past 10 to 15 years, that's changed because we've now started to rely on neurobiology, right? Psychology is

essentially mechanism, or a metaphor, neurology, and neuro-size is mechanism. It's, you know, how the brain works. And using mechanism to train up flow, for example, in my organization, we train about 1,000 people a month. We measure flow pre and post using the standard psychometric instruments. We'll see about 70% increase in flow. And we have seen that for a while, six, seven, eight years,

where, oh, wow, this stuff is really trainable. What started to happen, though, early on, and this is where our impossible comes in is, we saw we could produce using kind of the neuroscience of how flow works in the brain, this spectacular surge and flow, which is great. Unbelievable surge is an optimum performance, but it wasn't stable. Like, people would go way up, 70% boost and flow,

and then the compression back down. And flow, one of its core characteristics, it's you fork, it's joyous, it's, you know, our favorite state on earth, and it's massively addictive. So when you start producing a really addictive state in people's lives, it gives them big performance, and something that goes away, they're pissed. And so the question was, well, what's going on? What are we missing? And I started to realize it wasn't always the case that we returned to baseline. Certain populations, we do a lot of work

or have done a lot of work over the years with the US special forces, Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, those, and professional athletes. They didn't return to baseline. A lot of other people did, and I started looking at what was missing. And we realized, peak performance is more than just flow. It is nothing more or less than getting our biology

to work for us rather than against us. That biology is actually four things. There's a set of skills under the heading of motivation. There's another set of skills under the heading of learning, set of skills under the heading of creativity and finally flow. And when you think about peak performance challenges, think about that motivations of what gets into the game,

learning allows you to continue to play. Creativity is how you steer and flow is how you amplify the results. That's the shorthand version of what that quartet of skills looks like. We started to realize that if we training up flow wasn't enough, you could massively amplify the amount of flow in your life. But unless you trained up motivation, learning and creativity as well, it wasn't

stable. It was like you got, we had a Model T and we souped up the engine, it was something the Model T could go 200 miles an hour, but it still had the skinny ass tires and that old frame, and it would just explode and that's the sense that what was happening. So in Art and Possible, it's the full suite of peak performance tools. It's motivation to learn and to creativity and to flow as a sort of how to, this is kind of the art of peak performance. So that's what's different.

There's some flow, and it's the first how to, I've ever written, one more flow in your life. This is the first time I've ever looped in and out. And in a sense, it's the textbook with which we use to train our clients as well. It's the foundational ideas that we build on with our clients. Amazing. I think it's super useful.

I personally love the book. And that's how we're going to break down this interview. We're going to go over it in four parts. So we're going to start with motivation, then learning, then creativity, and flow. So we will get into all of those. Let's start off with the definition of impossible. From my understanding, there's a lower case I, and an uppercase I. Talk to us about that. I think it will set some good

ground for our listeners. I spent my career studying people who have accomplished capital I impossible right how do we know people from its motivation learning great right that's it came out of 30 years of studying people who accomplished what I call cap law impossible which the standard definition that which has never been done that which we don't believe can read on but the book is really meant to be utilized by anybody interested in small line possible by call small line possible And a small line possible is all those things that we think are impossible for ourselves and really simple example that I give on the book from my own life I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio in the 70s. It's a blue collar steel mill town and I wanted to be a writer from the time I was a kid.

I didn't know any writers and not how you became a writer. There was no books. There was no internet. There was nobody to ask. It was a small lion possible because there was no clear path from where I was and where I wanted to go. And statistically, Lausier's a success. Other examples of small line possible.

Rising out of poverty. Overcoming trauma. Becoming a successful artist or entrepreneur. Those are all small line possible. No clear path from A to B. Bet poor odds of success. There are more and more. The cool thing is this.

Because people performance is nothing more than giving our biology work for us. Rather than against us, the same biology that gets you to capitalize impossible is the same biology that gets you to small line possible. If you're listening to me talking, you're like, dude, shut up, small line possible, big line possible. I want to do like Tuesday. Help me get through Tuesday. Well, it turns out the same biology is in a play.

If you want to get through Tuesday, you want to go after small lion boss, will you want to go after capa lion boss? Well, the toolkit is the same because there's just our biology. That's what we're working with. Got it. So basically you're saying the formula works, whether it's something that seems like a really impossible goal for humans in general, or whether it's just something personally that you're struggling with to personally that you're struggling with to believe that you're capable of. I wrote it in a sense, because half my books are on technology, and I write about people doing

and possible things with technology, and a lot of the impossible things people do with technology are of the save the world's right. Right there, they're going after grand challenges, energy scarcity, poverty, water shortage, just stuff that we have to fix. Things that have literally never been done before. Things that have never been done before.

And I've written books about people using technology to accomplish these things. And I always say that in my books, I feature people. But for every 100 people who make it into the book, there's like 10,000 who almost made it into the book. And it had a whole change of technology and didn't get there. And usually when you look under the what went wrong, it's very rarely the technology, the actual idea, the thing that could change the world, it's the people. It's people

tripping over themselves that tends to block most of this stuff that we really desperately need. And that to me is like small-eyed stuff. So yes, it's useful across the board. I wrote it for people aiming at small-line possible because I think that's the stuff that has to get done to fight global warming, to fight species diop, to those kinds of issues that I care deeply about. Yeah, 100%.

Okay, so motivation, the first pillar. Why does motivation even matter? And how does it relate to things like focus and action? Great questions. I'll try to go quickly, but let's sort of start. What does motivation is define? What do scientists 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- 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 gonna work hard to get. 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 that is hired to drive our own bus, mastery that is desired to get really great at the things we do. These are all really powerful intrinsic motivators, and I just named the big five that we're going to focus on. There's also goal set.

There's three tiers of goals in there, find that there's six levels of grit skills There's six kinds of different grit skills all that gets folded under this heading motivation quite simply If 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 they get starts with extrinsic motivation,

ghosting interns, it goes to goals and goals to grit. And we can talk 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 evolved to evolve. And it just makes these, you just get farther faster. If you sort of do it in line, but it pretty clear that you have to start if you're trying

to amplify motivation, your interested in people performance, motivations where you've got to start. If you want to increase motivation, you actually have to start with the experience of motivation. You have to start with stuff in the real world. The data is pretty clear. Daniel Connman did a little of the Nobel 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 that 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.

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, if you can't win, you have to solve that problem first, then you go face all the other people for challenges. 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. It'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, 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 in productivity, yeah, we'll still keep wanting things in the real world. It doesn't mean we stop wanting money,

to expand, right? Of course, that just doesn't go away. But if you're really interested in people performance and amplifying productivity and motivation, intrinsic is the way to go. And as I said, there's five big ones and they design 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 focus and attention? And this is that answer. So curiosity, passion, purpose, time, and history, these are all intrinsic motivators. 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 a virtues signaling than anything. Like from a peak performance perspective, this stuff is very selfish actually. And the reason is simply this, when I think about curiosity, what do we get when you're curious about something? When you're interested in something, you pay attention to it automatically.

You don't have to work hard. Curiosity, something with passion, you pay, think about falling in love. That's passion. How much the attention you pay to the other person, right? Tonnest up, purposes more of the same, et cetera, et cetera. Focus for free is a really big deal. The brain is a huge energyologist. It's 20, 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 a tiny little bit of your body mass.

So you, Gen. G. 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. 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. 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. 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, which is what kind of ardened possible teachers you had to do in a sense, then 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. Everything was one of all the possible fuel sources, so they could be at the 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 your lining motivators so you can tap every possible fuel source. It's for the simple reason that peak performance, going after impossible levels, is hard. It's unpleasant. It's difficult. 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. This sucks. I got to tough it out. And this sucks, I got to tough it out. It's not going to get you. You're going to get burned out. You won't get this sucks. I'm going to tough it out. You this sucks, I get a 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. 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 people, performers, reach for, not the first tool. And I think in a lot of society we have it backwards, especially young your generation because they're tougher, they're resilient. You can stay up all night like at college teachers who do that being a young or all this stuff you sort of learn how to do. So just reach for grit, reach for grit because you're tough enough, you can handle it. What you start to figure out pretty quickly is holy crap. This is a lot of us yet. 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 a fuel, there's not enough energy there. You have to reach for all the other motivators first and then grit is your last resort. Okay, so let me try to recap this. And I want to stay on motivation for a little while because there's a lot to break down in just this one bit. 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. 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 rents, 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, time and mastery. Okay. Now, extrinsic values is kind of like the carrot and the stick. Why is it that the carrot starts to become not enough? Like, why is it that extrinsic runs out and is kind of short-lived while intrinsic is a long-term way to stay motivated. That is a really good question. Do we know 100%?

I don't know if we know 100% but what the science seems to show is you have to remember that we evolved to say safe and secure, right? And safe and secure, once basic needs are met, you can get more of them in a certain way, but it can end up as a zero-sum game. But if you can follow Kiriastu, you can follow passion, you can follow purpose.

It leads to possibly more safety, more security, more stuff. It seems to unlock the adjacent possible innocence. So that seems to be from a really basic up-lustinary standpoint. Some of the thinking around the answer to that question, but I think the real answer is we don't entirely know. Other than this just seems to be how we're hardwired and it shows up again and again. And again, in fact, Dan Panks' book drive covers a lot of the kind of foundation research for economists sort of figured this out.

You know, there are tons of different studies on it. We, from a neuroscience perspective, you see slightly different things. So I'll give you one example. Autonomy. Turns out that autonomy and attention in the brain are coupled systems. So you cannot pay complete attention to something and attention drives all performance, right? It's the gateway and everything we're going to do. You can't pay attention to it, you can't do it,

and you can't give something your undivided attention if you're not, you're not doing it by choice if you don't want to do it. So even if you have to do something that you hate, you need to maximize motivation, productivity, you want to reframe it. So I used it as a journalist, have to write stories. You know, especially when I was coming up and I was younger, that I wasn't thrilled about. But I was, right, I was paying bills. Sometimes I have great stories about stuff I was super interested in, sometimes not as interesting. But I've always find something in the story or a way to write the story.

Like maybe I would do things like, remember writing a story about data caves for wire? Was a little interested in data caves, but I didn't really care. But I tried to write it in the style of Charles Dickens and get it past the wire sensors. So they wouldn't notice that I was trying to learn. Because that made this thing that I didn't want to do wasn't motivated into a reframed it.

I was like, well, I don't want to write about data caves. I'm trying to write like Charles Dickens write about data caves and get it in and it's sneaking into wire magazine. Now that's funny. That's just playful and curious. And, you know, I'll do that for a couple of days. Sure. And that's one way to think about that one.

So another, you know, a neurobiological example. Okay. So there's five intrinsic motivators. Why is it that they have to be in the same order and why is it that you need all five? Why is it that just two or three of them won't work? How are they all kind of interconnected and related? So it's not the two or three wrong work, of course they will. It's that these five,

then there are dozens more, right? Spite is an intrinsic motivator. You know, coaches and NFL use bulletin board material all the time to motivate players, and that's an intrinsic motivator. These five are the biggest ones. They produce, when we're talking about motivation, you're talking about neurochemistry. When we do a perform an action that kind of furthers our chances of survival, we get rewarded. And that reward is, we call that reward motivation. Those rewards come in the form of neurochemicals. Dopamine is the most familiar, feel-good reward chemical. And when we're curious,

we get a little bit of dopamine and a little bit of noraponephrine, basic motivators. The problem with curiosity is a, it's not powerful enough to stand us for the long haul, right? The reason you want all five is because you want as much fuel as you possibly can, long haul. And these five are the biggest ones, meaning they produce the biggest, most neural chemical reward. Why they're designed, they're one is designed to build into the next for evolutionary reasons. That's an evolutionary biology discussion that we can spend the next hour on, and I'm happy to do it, but it's probably not where you want to go.

So I'm going to park that for a second. Think about it this way. Kira Astu is a little bit of, don't be in a little bit of norapenifer. Those are the two feel good performance in enhancing neurochemicals. You get that. You're reward for Kira Astu being Kira Astu.

Passion, which is literally nothing more than the intersection of multiple curiosities. One curiosity just can't sustain you for the long haul. So what is passion? It's with three or four or five of your curiosities, meet each other. That's what passion is. So you first of all, you can see naturally, curiosity, design, we built into passion because curiosity is baking to the definition of passion. What do you get with passion? Much more dopamine and noraponephrine. Much more feel-good rewarding neural chemistry. Purpose is the next step in the chain simply because you can't get any more noraponephrine

and dopamine. If I turn those knobs up higher above passion, I move you into schizophrenia and mental illness. So you don't want to do that, but what you do want to do is add more fuel-good, performance dancing neurochemicals to the equation. That means you need pro-social chemicals, the neurochemicals that reward our pro-social behavior. Procreation is good for the species. It's neurochemically rewarded in dolphins, serotonin, oxytocin.

These are pro-social, reward chemicals. They motivate social behavior. Once you have passion, if you can couple it to a cause greater than myself, something that helps other people, something that helps the plants, it helps animals plants. It doesn't matter. You start literally getting those pro-social chemicals. Once you have those pro-social chemicals. Once you have those pro-social chemicals, then autonomy and mastery just fall because once you have purpose, you need

the freedom to pursue it and you need the skills to pursue it. So that's why they stack that way. And it's literally just trying to get more neural chemicals to drive you forward. Awesome. So I'm starting to really understand this, and I think my listeners are definitely starting to really understand these five intrinsic motivators. So autonomy, I feel like, can be relative. So how much autonomy do we actually need to be in control of our lives, or feel like we're in control of our lives? It's an interesting question, as I said, in our impossible.

We don't have a scientific answer yet, but we have this great case studies. So the first case studies everybody's familiar with is what Google uses, 20% time. They give their employees 20% to tap, autonomy as a motivator. If you're an engineer, you work at Google. If you work there for over a year, 20% of your time, you can do whatever you want with as long as it benefits the company But it's you follow your passion your own curiosity and as it worked 50% of Google's highest revenue projects all

Emerge done at 20% time so it works particularly for the employees They're motivated for the company. They got what they wanted Gould and invented they actually took it from the re-em was been doing the same thing since the 50's I want to say the 60s with 15% time. So, okay, wait a minute. 3M just figured out 15% time is enough. That's about an afternoon a week to follow your passion or purpose. So, that is a rough way to think about it. Patagonia, the outdoor retailer, all routinely could top charts of best places to work in America and employee autonomy is one of the big reasons why. And yet, if you work at a Patagonia, they have very limited autonomy.

It's just very specific. And there's basically two thing rules of Patagonia. One is employees get to make their own schedule. And we'll talk about why that's important in a second. And the second is almost 30 works of pedagogy is an action sport athlete. Their company headquarters is right on the Pacific Ocean and Ivan Sinar, the guy who founded pedagogy, is a surfer. So he has a let my people go surfing and rule. They have the autonomy to go surfing. Whenever the waves are breaking, you could be in a meeting,

you could be on the phone, you could be on the phone, you can be on deadline, doesn't matter. You have the freedom to hang out the phone, walk out of the meeting and go surfing. So that seems weird, but it actually works, and it works for four reasons. That little bit of autonomy is, they're giving employees, for peak performance reasons,

works for, so schedule control loves you to do two things We have natural circadian rhythms. I'm an extreme mark. I wake up I'm wide awake at four o'clock in the morning. I'm gonna do my best work my wife's a night out She doesn't wake up till seven o'clock at night. That's when she does her best work and Most of my friends are normal people they wake up and do the best work eight nine 10 o'clock in the morning, right? They're in the middle. It's hard to fight your biology. So if you have the freedom to control your schedule,

you can start your work day, you start beginning your work day with your hardest task when you have maximum energy. So that's a big deal. The other thing about controlling your own schedule is you get to control your sleep schedule. And one of the foundational ideas in peak performance is we need, we humans need seven, eight hours of sleep

and night and it's not really negotiable. They've done study after study after study after study after study after study and no, we all need about seven, eight hours of sleep and night. And if you're interested in a high flow lifestyle you want to maximize flow because of performance it's a high energy state. So you really need those seven, eight hours of sleep.

So the freedom to control your schedule is the autonomy to get as much sleep as you want and to work in accordance with your circadian rhythms. OK? On the flip side, when you get from the let my people go surfing thing, two things. One, foundational people performance says you got to regulate your nervous system,

right? Fear blocks performance and there are three great ways to regulate, to kind of manage fear. A daily graded to practice, a daily mindfulness meditation practice, or daily exercise. And exercise is probably the most consistent of those. Like it will work for everyone all the time. The other ones are effective as well. Gratitude works, doesn't work. It's not as effective, kind of in terms of how it calms you down, as exercise. And mindfulness is very effective over time.

So different tools, but giving employees the freedom to surf is, hey, whenever you want to go exercise, go exercise. So everybody's a lot calmer. Because of their calmer, right, let's be our better performance. The other thing is surfing is a high flow activity. It's packed with flow triggers, which stuff we talked about in your previous podcast. So they're giving their employees the freedom to pursue flow in their favorite flow activity, get regular exercise, get as much sleep as that you need, and work in accordance with your circadian rhythms. And those four bits of autonomy seem to be enough as a place to start if you're interested.

If you've got more freedom, 15% of your time dedicated to your passion and purpose is enough to get started. The thing about it is it's deadly effective over time. The performance is compound interest a little bit today, it's a little bit tomorrow, it's not. So it's 15% of your time every week, but every week. And it's the consistency over months and years that really produces the significant results.

So yeah, it's really easy and that actually tends to work against it in the modern world because we like things that are ways back and sexy. And it works actually very, very fast and probably faster than any of the other shortcuts you're going to try that aren't going to get you there and then you're going to come back and do it this way because this is really the only. There's no other options. These are the only tools there are, but we're going to keep looking for shortcuts because we're human.

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you're gonna love gusto. Get started today. People are still, a lot of people are still working remotely. And I feel like it must be amazing for people's productivity because me, myself, I'm an entrepreneur now, but for, I was working at Disney Streaming

and there was almost a whole year I was working from home. And I got a lot more sleep. I was able to exercise whenever I wanted. All the set in, I could get my work done in six hours instead of eight and it didn't matter. So I feel like it's really good this movement that we're doing for humanity overall

in terms of our productivity. I think COVID was fantastic for that. And one of the things that's really interesting, so this making time for your highest low activity, the surfing in the Patagonia case, one of the things that we learned during COVID is the people who had the least amount of stress during COVID, the least amount of languishing during COVID and the most flourishing then and now are the people who have the most flow in their lives during COVID. And it's

really about, did you make time for this high flow activity in your life? Seems to be like, you know, not only do we learn really good habits, I think, working from home, but we also got to double down on that high flow thing. And we saw that it made a real difference in people's lives. So one more thing on intrinsic motivation, and then we'll move on. You say that mastery is the thing that people tend to forget. Why is that and why is mastery important? I don't think they tend to forget it. To me, it's the master motivator. So while all the other ones are potent, I think mastery consistently over time provides the most for award and is the most sort of tight in the flow because walking

the path, the mastery is about kind of pushing on your skills a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more, and that's a great rest, a rest week for a high flow of life style as well, where you're kind of stretching your skills over and over again, you know, challenge skills balance. We talked about last time we were together on which one of those most potent triggers.

So that is what allows you to walk the path of mastery. And I don't necessarily know if it's, if people forget it, I think people sometimes don't think mastery as possible for themselves. So they don't push in that direction or they're impatient with mastery. It's sort of like, I think passionate mastery, people have the same issue with like, when

I think about, I ask you to describe a kind of a passionate, a, give me an example of passion or mastery, you'll, you'll serena Williams playing tennis or LeBron James playing basketball kind of thing. And those things are true, but like, that's late stage passion and late stage mastery. We forget what it looks like on the front end, where it's just someone who learned how play tennis for the first time. Somebody who learned how to shoot a basketball at the first time, and that's what it looks like on the front end.

It doesn't matter where you are as you are as you walk in the path of mastery. We just like getting better and better at the things we do. It produces a lot of dopamine. And that drives us farther. Got it. So mastery is basically just continuing learning and wanting to continue to learn and learning new things. Is that what mastery is? I'm just trying to be super clear about what that is.

And mastery is literally defined as the desire to get better and better at the things that we do. That is literally what it is. It's nothing more of us. I want to get better at the things that we do. That is literally what it is. It's nothing more of us. I want to get better at the stuff I do. Okay. So then next would be goal setting the three levels of goals and then grit. So why is goal setting important and what are these three levels all about? So it's the same that goals provide motivation and if you want to maximize motivation,

energy for action, you want more energy for action, same reason, because the five intrinsic motivators in your extrinsic motivator, if you've done anything significant and hard in your life, you know you need all the fuel you can get. Like those are great fuel sources, but can you get more? Yes.

How do you get more? You set proper goals. What are the three tiers? Even beings function best. When we have mission level goals, this is like purpose. I need a meaning of purpose in my life. High-art goals. These are the multi-year steps that lead towards our purpose and then clear goals, the daily action steps. So for example, I want to write great books. That's a mission level goal. A high-art goal is I want to write a book called The Art of Impossible.

That's a middle level goal. And a clear goal is I'm going to write 500 pages or 500 words in the book, The Art Impossible, today. Clear goals are daily action plans. What am I doing? What am I doing next? Word, I put my attention. How do I declare victory when it's over?

I know. If I write 500 words, according to word count, okay, cool. I'm done for today. I can declare victory. Once I declare victory, I get a little bit more dopamine and thus more motivation. And so you want much like you want all of your intrinsic motivators pointed in the same direction, you want your goals aligned with your intrinsic motivators pointed in the same direction, you want your goals aligned with your intrinsic motivators. So everything is pointed in the same direction to maximize motivation.

So in terms of your goal setting, do you recommend, so there's three levels of goals for your daily goals. When are you, how are you creating your daily goals? Is it the day before? Is it the day of? Is it in the morning? Like how do you do it? I think everybody's got their own thing and they're the day before? Is it the day of? Is it in the morning? Like, how do you do it? I think everybody's got their own thing, and they're the only way of doing it. I, so clear

goals are flow trigger. Besides being a motivator, it's also a flow trigger. Flow follows focus, and clear goals tell us where to put our attention. This is what I'm focusing on now. This is what I'm focusing on. Next, my attention doesn't have to wander. I don't have to know. Also, clear goals, when you write a clear goal is list and writing by hand matters on this one. There's a relationship between hand movement and memory that is different than if you type. It's an evolution. We've just been writing by hand for longer. It seems to work better. So I don't just, I write it in an notebook, right? Like, this is my clear goal list for the day, right there. And so all I do is I like to write them the night before so that when I get up to work at 4 a.m., I know exactly what I'm doing. I don't

have to wonder. And when I design a clear goal list, there's a couple of rules I follow. One, you want to start your work session, according to the circadian rhythms, and then you want to start session with your hardest task. The reason is, quite simply, that willpower burns out over the course of a day. It declines over time. You can replenish it a little bit, but it's never higher than at the beginning

if you're an extreme large-like mate, four o'clock in the morning. If you're an extreme large like me four o'clock in the morning if you're my wife it's eight o'clock at night but whatever that is you're never gonna have more energy in this given work day so I want to start my hardest task and my biggest win my biggest win meaning like if I got it done it's the biggest win for the day what does that mean it's gonna give me the most freaking dopamine so the most motivation to go through all the items on other items, on my to-do list. How many items go on my clear goal list, my to-do list? You have to run an experiment. How many things in a day can you do and be excellent at? And anything you do that's going to take energy. So if I got to walk my dog, that's going to take energy.

So it's going to go on the list. If, right, I do want to do a gratitude practice. It's going to go on the, everything I do, if I need to have a conversation with my wife, it's going to go on the list. Everything I can do over the day that will take energy, because that's what you're trying to do, preserve energy in a sense. Clear goals, emphasis on clear here, especially if you're talking to Western audiences, they hear clear goals, they're all about the goals, and they ignore the clear. It actually, from a cognitive load perspective, and from a motivation perspective, emphasis on clarity. Your brain wants to know, what am I doing?

What am I doing now? What am I doing next? Not how do I declare victory? In fact, the clearing victory often takes your focus off like where it should be to accomplish. Oh, you start, you think about this thing that's gonna happen in the future when it's done. No, no, no, you want to focus on the clear. What am I doing right here right now? So, for example, most of the time I can write my clear goal, we'll say, write 500 words

in the new book, right? And that's what my goal list will say. But if I'm a little stuck, for example, right? It'll say, write 500 words that make the reader feel excited or make the reader feel fear or whatever it is. I'll give it a little more clarity just so I know. And I like to set them as I said the night before because it prepares the work container for the next day. And the most important thing about a clear goal list for people, for instance, sustaining motivation, check the shit off. You have to check it off by hand because that's literally your brain goes,

oh it's done, I can stop thinking about it, it lowers cognitive load, which produces releases more energy that you can then spend on your next task. It also allows you to declare victory. This is a real problem. You know this is an entrepreneur. When the fuck are you done working? Right? Like, when am I done? How do I know I'm done for the day? And if you don't know when you're done for the day, you can't shut off, you can't recover, and you end up burning out. I know I can be excellent at nine things in a day. Trying to do 10 or 11 is stupid, because I literally can't be excellent at 10 or 11. I can't perform as a peak performer at those items. So I don't even try, right?

That's an automatic no. If I wake up and there's more than nine things to do, I'm like, well, that's, I can't do that and be graded this stuff. Something's got to give. I'm going to move some stuff, right? That's like what has to happen. So I know how many items go on the list because I can be only excellent in about nine things in the day. I know what order they're going to go into because writing is the hardest thing I've got to do every day. It's going to go first and so forth on my day.

And that's sort of how I think about it. And I want the list done the night before. So my cognitive load is already lessened. I want to export that out of my brain before I try to go to sleep, because I don't want to hang on my brain while thinking about this stuff. I want to know what I'm going to do tomorrow. So my brain's like, okay, I know what I can do.

I can start focusing on that, not wondering about, like what do you have to do? You might have to call this person, you might have to, right? Yeah, I think, honestly guys, if you take one thing away from this episode, this is such a big life hack. The night before, right down, the main things that you need to do the next day, it will stop all these loops going on in your head. So you get better sleep and then you know what you got to do in the morning. It's the hardest. It's so simple. It's so dumb and

it's so powerful. It's so unbelievable. In fact, when we do with a lot of really super stressed out C-suite executives, Fortune 500, I run up billion dollar company executives. And this is the first place when you're fighting burnout. This is step one. If you're trying to fight burnout, this is the very first thing you have to do to fight

burnout. It gives you so much control of your life back and it's such a dumb little, I'm going to write out a daily to do list. Okay, that really, yes, really. You would get so much more ahead in life. I remember the moment when I started doing to-do list was the moment that my career likes started to accelerate. Because when you don't do that, you're just a mess.

It's amazing how far you get those nine items at a time. That's how you go to impossible, and it's really hard to convince that people of that. I always tell people, the hardest lesson to learn is that hard work works, and it works one checklist at a time. And I can't, like if I could convince people of that ahead of time, be like before they did it, this would all be really, really easy. That's the hardest thing for people to believe. Yeah, that it could be that simple

to make that much progress. So let's talk about grit, because you said grit is kind of your last resort. Why wouldn't just these intrinsic motivators be enough? Why is grit kind of the last piece of the puzzle there? Quite simply because we have bad days and because life is hard, just in general it's hard. And if you're trying to get someplace

that's difficult to get to statistically, others stacked against you, that makes it worse. You want more fuel sources. The fuel is going to run out. At some point, it's just going to run out. And then you want to reach for grip. I won't go through. There are six different kinds of grip that people, performers, all need to train.

There's the grip to control your thoughts. There's what we think of as persistence. The like, you know, I'm just going to keep coming resilience. There's grip to negotiate with fear and a bunch of others. The last one that I want to talk about that I think is worth mentioning is in peak performance, recovery is a grit skill. So the grit to recover, we need seven to eight hours of sleep and we should have an active recovery protocol in place, active recovery.

Passive recovery is I worked really hard today and the home drink a beer and much TV. And it doesn't work, it doesn't reset the body, especially if you're working really hard, right? And burning a lot of energy, you have to replenish motivation, you have to replenish willpower and television a beer. And I'm going to go to to sleep isn't going to get it done. Active recovery is a sauna, an ex-insult bath, a long walk in nature, restorative yoga, breath work. All these are active recovery practices. And one of the reasons you want to be able to clear victory over your day is so you know, okay, this is now, I can shut down, right? Now I can relax. For peak performers, people tend to hate to shut it down. If you're a hard-charging type A entrepreneurial artist type, you will never shut it down.

You have to earn help. One of the grit skills, and the other ones are how you train them, all that stuff in the book, with the one that's less obvious, is for peak performers, for our charge on a winner's grit recovery is a grit skill because you really have to, it is, you know, especially like I'm having a problem right in the book or I'm having a problem, you know, the flow research collective with a science project

or, you know what I mean, I don't wanna stop. I wanna, like I'll go all night four or five days in a row and then I'll just collapse and be burned out. And that's good for nobody. And I can't perform my best. And, like, you know, I don't do that anymore. But it, like, I've learned now that, like, shutting it down and saying, okay, I'm done for the day. This is all I can do. I'm done.

That's hard. That takes practice. And it would, when I say it takes practice, you have to, what you have to learn is that you'll actually get farther over time by stopping and recovering than you will by trying to grit through it. That's the point. But you can't learn that again ahead of time, you have to go through and then you're on the back and you're like, oh, I get it. I go farther faster with a lot less fuss with an active recovery practice. Okay, so part of the grit, especially when you're super productive, especially when you're an entrepreneur, is prioritizing self-care and having the willpower to stop, even though

you're so passionate about it, and you want to do it to stop and recover and get sleep and all that kind of good stuff. Okay, so let's talk about learning. You say, learning is what keeps you in the game. Talk to us more about the importance of learning. Hear that sound, young and profitors? You should know that sound by now, but in case you don't, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify.

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and an extremely talented marketer. She's the owner of NotOne, but six thriving companies, and now she's ready to share her knowledge and experience with you on the Kelly Roach show. Kelly is an inspirational entrepreneur, and I highly respect her. She's been a guest on YAP. She was a former social client. She's a podcast client, and I remember when she came on Young & Profiting and she talked about her conviction marketing framework. It was like mind blowing to me. I remember immediately implementing

what she taught me in the interview in my company and the marketing efforts that we were doing. And as a marketer, I really, really respect all Kelly has done, all Kelly has built. In the corporate world, Kelly secured seven promotions in just eight years, but she didn't just stop there. She was working in I to five and at the same time she built her eight-figure company as a side hustle and eventually took it and made her full-time hustle. And her strategic business goals led her to win the prestigious Inc. 500 award for the fastest growing business in the United States. She's built an empire. She's earned a life-changing wealth. And on top of all that, she maintains a happy marriage and healthy home life On the Kelly Road show you'll learn that it's possible to have it all

Tune into the Kelly Road show as she unveils her secrets for growing your business It doesn't matter if you're just starting out in your career or if you're already a seasoned entrepreneur in each episode Kelly shares the truth about what it takes to create rapid exponential growth Unlock your potential unleash your success and start living your dream life today. Tune into the Kelly Road Show available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Well, we've gone through the intrinsic motivators, got to mastery, right? The path to mastery requires skills acquisition and knowledge acquisition.

So you have to, you want to continue travel the path to master, you want to continue down up how the big performance, that's the next thing in line. You have to learn to learn, learn how to learn and learning is a, it's a few more meta skills that surround learning. So in the learning section, I've got a section on skills acquisition and a section on knowledge acquisition. I've also got a section on truth filters. Truth filters are things like the scientific method or I'm trained as a reporter, so there's a way we fact check, so I'm going to fact check stories. Elon Musk or philosophers will talk about first principle thinking. These are all truth filters. Their ways to, I need to learn to continue to walk past

the master's repeat performance. How do I evaluate what I'm learning? Quickly. How do I know I can trust it? How do I know it's right? It's accurate, right? Because if you're learning from bad information, you're not getting anywhere. And so you've got to be able to assess that. And there are questions of what material should I learn from? What are the best, what's the best thing to learn? Those things get sort of folded in under learning, but the really big point is you just, if you're interested in performance,

you have to learn how to learn. I totally agree. I think learning is such an important skill. I thought it was really interesting when you talked about the ROI on reading books. I thought this was super interesting. I'd love for you to share that with my listeners. For sure, great, great thing.

So this is the question of learning materials. What should you learn from? And I always tell people that if you want the most band for your buck, you want to be reading books. And here's why. You have to think about it from a what I'm trading my time for your knowledge, right? That's the exchange that's going on when you're trying to learn something. If you're learning, you're going to learn from, let's say, a blog versus a magazine article, versus a book, versus a podcast or lecture, right? Those are the main things we're going to learn from. Think about it.

I always like to think about it from a writer. I wrote a blog for five years. I wrote a blog for Psychology Day for six years. Across the board every time I wrote a blog, I do about a day's worth of research and then spend a day writing the blog. And that's like four hours of research in the morning and then four hours of writing the next day. And then maybe I would kind of edit it a third day, right? So you got about 12 hours of my hard work in the blog, and you can read an average blog. It's about 800

words, average human being reads 250 words a minute. So you read my 800 word blog in like three to four minutes. So you give me four minutes or three minutes and I give you three days. That's the return on investment, the ROI for a blog. Now take a magazine article like a cover story I would do for a while or something like that. On average, it's about 5,000 words long and it'll take you about 20 minutes to read average reading speed. So what do you get in exchange for the 20 minutes? You've got three days for about four minutes. What do you get for 20 minutes?

Well, average magazine article, it would take me about a month of research before I found the story, three to four months worth of research to report the story, another three months to write the story, then another couple of months to work with my editors and policy story. You'd not just get my brain on it, but you've got all the other research I would call, and my editor's brain, and the editor, and she's brain, and so you give me 20 minutes, and suddenly you're getting nine months of my life

and a bunch more brain power. Wow, that's a better trade, right? That's a much better return on investment. You're getting so many more facts in your head that you're learning from books are even crazy. So take the art of impossible. The art of impossible is, I think it was 80,000 words long or so it'll take the average person about eight hours to read, let's say.

That's probably a little under, maybe it's eight and a half nine. What do you get in exchange? Well, that book is built on 30 years of research into the neurobiology of peak performance. Everything I've learned over the past 30 years has been folded into that and all the scientists I've worked with, you know, as a journalist running the flow research collected the 70 people who are on staff with me who work with me, right? It's a lot of collective firepower. So yes, you give me eight to nine hours of your life, but you're getting 30 years in exchange. And the point is on books is they're the most information-dense learning source on the planet. You can't beat that value. And a lot of

people want to listen to podcasts, and a lot of people want to go to lectures, and I give lectures, I have a podcast, I appear on podcast, and I can tell you that the information that's in podcasts and lectures is nowhere close to what books are. It's not, you're not even in this Cindy. I'm not saying you can't learn from these other sources, but if you're looking for the maximum bang for your buck, if you're busy and you only have X amount of time, books of the tool to reach for. Again, it's like you think you would like realize this, but when you actually say

you realize that wow, books really are somebody's heart and soul that they've probably researched for years and years. For me, I won't even interview somebody who doesn't have a book because I'm like, they don't have a perspective, they don't have enough to talk about. I don't know what I would even talk to them about, because I can't go deep enough. So I thought that was super interesting. So moving on to creativity. Creativity is something we can't see. And I feel like people don't really know what it means.

So can you explain to us what creativity means in your opinion? So there's one sort of across the board, standard scientific definition of creativity. A lot of people, they'll mutate it in like, you'll see 70,000 slightly different versions, but it always comes down to the creation of novel ideas that are useful.

And the useful part is what really distinguishes sort of creativity from imagination. If it's just novel ideas, I think it up something cool and it's neat, that's imagination. Once it's useful for other people in any way, shape or form, that's creativity. Creativity is defined as the creation of novel ideas that are useful. So it's just novelty, if it's just a novel idea, that's just imagination, that's not creativity. Once it becomes useful and useful can mean, I see a beautiful painting and have an aesthetic experience, right? That

can be useful as well. Then you're moving into creativity. So that's, it's nothing more or less than that. And is there a way a way to hack that state of creativity? This is a lot of the work that's happened in neurobiology. The neuroscience of creativity has really exploded over the past five or ten years. We have a really good understanding of how creativity works in the brain and how to get yourself to be more creative. It's not what you think it is. Well, I'll give you a simple example.

We talked earlier about the importance of stand calm for peak performance. One of the reasons is the more anxiety in your system, the less creative you're gonna be. And the reason is quite simply that when your anxious are scared, the brain wants logical, linear, safe, tried, and true solutions. So the more anxiety, the more logical, the fewer choices we get to make.

The extreme example is extreme danger. And the brain says, okay, there's a tiger in front of you. You have two options. You can fight or you can flee. You actually can freeze. There's three options. But doesn't want to give you a lot of choices. This is your three options. You can fight or you can flee. You actually can freeze. There's three options, but doesn't want to give you a lot of choices. This is your three options. Well, what people don't realize is just a little bit of anxiety will do the same thing. You don't get three,

but maybe you'll only get 10 and when we're calm, Brian goes, oh, let's consider all solutions. Let's think outside the box. There's no threat to your life so I can be a little wackier. That is one way to stimulate creativity. There are ways to like, we know that when you look up the corners of your eyes and use your peripheral vision, this activates the parasympathetic nervous system and calms you down. So looking out the corner of your eyes will make you more creative. What does that mean? I'll give you an example. When I'm writing in the morning and I get stuck, I walk outside and I live in TOS.

I can like look out and see the Sierra's. And when they're not all on fire, it's a huge Y-Fista. And I just like look at the whole of the mountain range and come back in more creative than I went outside. So I was stuck at Gossad and I can you, so what's happening is we're starting to understand how creativity works in the brain. So now it's not this big, weird amorphous, you know, what is this thing?

How do I do it? And the thing is you have to practice parts of creativity. There's skills involved in a lot of creativity, but it tends to be, it's a way of thinking about what you're doing, right? We're now starting to understand kind of the mechanism underneath that way of thinking, and that's a lot of sort of what I cover

in the art impossible is like ways to to the brain for more creativity. That's super fascinating. So last pillar is flow. How does this all tie back to flow? So it all ties back to flow. First of all, because if you want more flow in your life, you have to stabilize all this stuff, right? It's not just enough to get more flow in your life. But as I said, at the beginning, motivation gets us into the peak performance game. Learning allows us to keep on playing creativity. It's how we steer, especially if we're going through those impossible goals, right? Like, how do I get there? Where is exactly, right? Creativity is how we steer towards these impossible goals. So when you say that, like, creativity

helps you creatively problem-solve towards your goal, is that what you mean by that? That's exactly what creativity, when we break it apart, it's dozens of different sub-components from problem identification, right? What exactly is this thing that I'm trying to solve, right? That's under the mirror, spend years on that particular one, like what is exactly the challenge that I'm all the way up to like idea execution? Those are all aspects of creativity

and creative decision making, creative problem solving. So there's a lot of sub components that feed into it. And flow just allows us, flow amplify, first of all, amplifies learning. It amplifies motivation, it amplifies bread, it amplifies learning. It amplifies motivation. It amplifies bread. It amplifies creativity. So it boosts all of these skills at once. And so, in a sense, motivation gets us in the game,

learning allows us to continue to play creativities, how we steer and close, how we turbo boost the results beyond our reason and expectation. And as you know, from the last podcast we did together, it's a pretty close up big boost in a lot of different skills. So it is a mass fanfication. And that's to me how they tie together. It's one system, it's the real point.

This is one entire system. It's designed to work in an order in a certain way. And you get in the right order, you can get more flow, gonna get farther faster, you're gonna get the results you want. Okay, so everybody, I want you to go grab that book, The Art of Impossible. Like we just said, reading books is your best ROI on your time if you want to learn. And the last question I ask all my guests, Steven, is what is your secret to profiting in life? It's not a fair question, because the secret

is everything I put in our embosses. And people are like, what do you do? This is what I do. This is what every of the flow research collective does. This is the biology. Like, I don't know if there's any secret beyond that. I will, I will, I'll end with, I'll give you one thought. I was, I think I outread most people.

The whole office is books. I wasn't a great student, I wasn't super smart, but I never stopped reading. And I'll read 150 books a year, kind of thing. And I've done that for a very, very, very long time. And it's amazing how far you can get by outreading people. Can I ask you a question? Is the audio book version just as good as reading the actual words?

Interesting question. It's a tricky question. So my guttions, my flash response is no, and let me tell you why. It's because most people, when they listen to the audio stuff don't pause the audio stuff to think about things They're trying to keep up with the speaker if you were to pause it because that's what books really give you It's not just that you're getting you're getting the same information density in both But in books you can pause and you can think and for a bunch of reasons that I have to do with how the brain learns and you know other stuff that I talk about and are impossible about kind of learning I think for that reason books are primary. Now that said if you are not a visual learner, if you are not really word-centric, if you're an audio learner, there are probably going to be a lot of exceptions to what I just said.

So I don't know, the problem with what I just said is, I don't know if it's just true for me or if it's true for everyone. And I try to like, when I try to like make statements about people's performance, I like things to be based on biology because they work for everybody. That one, I can't quite tell, as a general rule, books are going to work better than an audio book, but if you do actually take the time to pause and really think about those things, especially if you take notes when you kind of listen to the Audi, a book, then I don't know if one can be better than the other.

Then I can't ask you a question, and I'd have to see studies. That goes back to what you said in your book, like personality doesn't scale biology. Scales, right? So that could be a personality thing. Okay, so where can our listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you do? Flowresearchcollective.com is everything from your interested in flow trainings,

if you're just interested in more about flow and beat performance. If you want to know more about me, stevencottler., and all over social media. Awesome. Well, thank you, Steve, for joining us again. You are one of my favorite interviews. I'd love to have you back on. Every time you have a new book and something new to say, so thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thanks for your interest. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast. If you enjoyed this show, make sure you take a few minutes right now to drop us a 5 star review. It's the number one way to thank me

and the team at YAP. What an amazing conversation with Steven. I always learned so much when he comes on the show, and I really enjoyed talking about his new book, The Art of Impossible, and all of its amazing takeaways. I was so intrigued about the difference between Impossible, and how there's a lower case I Impossible, and uppercase I impossible and how we do impossible things every day. Overcoming our everyday adversities, dealing with trauma, sticking to our goals and motivations, that is small I impossible. Achieving the impossible is so much closer than we think. Our brain is hardwired with the biology to help us achieve both big eye and small eye impossible.

It's working for us to reach those new heights, and we all have the capability to achieve the impossible, whether it be a personal struggle or a bigger goal for the greater good. Steven told us that his personal pillars on how to maintain peak performance to achieve our own impossible, our motivation, learning, creativity, and flow. Setting clear motivation is a first key to getting to where you want to go, whether you use internal motivators or external ones. The why behind your goal setting is so imperative.

In order to level up and become a master at our own peak performance, we have to constantly be acquiring new skills and knowledge and learning. It may sound simple, but learning to learn is a key pillar in being able to master skill, reach peak performance, and ultimately unlock our creative potential.

All of these lead back to flow, being able to reach that state of extreme focus and peak performance to achieve our goals. The biggest takeaway from me for this conversation was that we are all capable of achieving the impossible. So many things in our day to day lives may think like an insurmountable peak we can never conquer, but if we put the word impossible into perspective, there are many different types of impossible. And we can see that we've actually done many impossible things in our lives,

and we're going to keep doing impossible things over and over and over again. In my personal journey, there's been so many times where I felt like I couldn't overcome something impossible, like trauma, grief, different adversities, different rejections, but I did overcome them, and I'm sure you have too. My talk with Stephen gave us so many tricks and tips on how we can hardware our brains to achieve the impossible, and I hope you learned as much as I did from this amazing interview. Thanks again to Steven Kotler. And if you enjoyed this episode and you want to hear more from Steven,

go check out my first interview with him on YAP number 32 flow into the future. So the best place to start is not with my definition of flow. It's with the technical definition of flow that the scientific deficit of flow, which is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. As you pointed out, my definition is very similar to what you just said. It's a moment, so those moments have kind of wrapped attention and total absorption. When you get so focused on the task and hand that everything else disappears. Action awareness will start to merge your sense of self- self consciousness, self-criticism will vanish completely.

Time passes strangely. The technical term is it dilates, which is a fancy way of saying it either slows down. You get a free-thrame effect from your enemies, been in a car crash or more frequently it speeds up and five hours go by and five minutes. You didn't even notice time was passing. And throughout as you pointed out, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. Again, if you liked this episode and wanna learn more about Flow specifically,

go check out Steven's first appearance on YAP episode number 32, Flow Into The Future. Now, I'd like to move on and shout out one of my latest podcast reviewers, and I'm super grateful for everybody who has left us a review on Apple podcasts. This one is from Panna and Lihwala. Thank you.

I just listened to episode number 138 with Stephanie Malik and wow, amazing. Some really interesting points for a raise that I can relate to in my own life. I now have a better understanding of how I can deal with these issues. Thank you so much and keep up the good work. Wow, thank you so much for that review and taking the time out to write it. And I totally agree that episode number 138 with Stephanie Malik, Spin it, get out of a crisis, was such a great episode. What an amazing conversation.

And if you guys are listening, check that out. You won't be disappointed. And if you're tuning in still, I want a five star review from you. You know you love the show. Take the time out to tell us I love to read your feedback. It is really important for us to get these reviews. And if you do enjoy the show, you can also share us on social media. You can find me on Instagram at Yab with Hala or LinkedIn.

Just search for my name. It's Hala Taha. Big thanks to Yab team. As always, I love you guys. I couldn't do this without you. This is Hala signing off. Are you looking for ways to be happier, healthier, more productive and more creative? I'm Gretchen Ruben, the number one best-selling author

of the Happiness Project. And every week, we share ideas and practical solutions on the Happier with Gretchen Ruben podcast. My co-host and Happiness Guinea Pig is my sister Elizabeth Kraft. That's me, Elizabeth Kraft, a TV writer and producer in Hollywood. Join us as we explore fresh insights from cutting-edge science, ancient wisdom, pop culture, and our own experiences about cultivating happiness and good habits. Every week we offer a try this at home tip you can use to boost your happiness

without spending a lot of time energy or money Suggestions such as follow the one minute rule choose a one word theme for the year or design your summer We also feature segments like know yourself better where we discuss questions like are you an over buyer or an under buyer? Morning person or night person abundance lever or simplicity, and every episode includes a happiness hack, a quick, easy shortcut to more happiness. Listen and follow the podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin. We did it. I still can't believe we got this project done so fast and so well.

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