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

Steven Kotler is a peak performance expert, entrepreneur and an author. The mystery of achieving peak performance is what many people are striving toward in life. Steven is a world expert in Flow and through years of cutting edge research, has finally created the recipe. Expect to learn how to break & build your motivation, the best way to hack your creativity, why Salvador Dali literally WAS drugs, the universal triggers you can use to drop yourself into flow, how to integrate peak performance protocols into your routine and much more... Sponsors: Book a Free Consultation Call with ActiveLifeRX at https://www.activelifeprofessional.com/modernwisdom Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 3.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Check out the Flow Research Collective - https://www.flowresearchcollective.com/ Check out Steven's website - https://www.stevenkotler.com/ Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #flow #peakperformance #mindset - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Put simply peak performance to the checklist. And what I always tell people is, at the end of every day, I make up a checklist for what I'm doing the next day. When I put it on the checklist, I'm making a promise to myself that I'm doing this tomorrow.

• 0:15Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that many of the things that we do and enjoy in life are just subtle delivery mechanisms for flow?

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Yes, and I'm not the only one. So can I define flow for your listeners first before we do this? Cool. Flow is, flow is obviously at the heart of the work I do, and it's what predominantly we study at the Flow Research Collective, right? The neurobiology of flow. So where does this state come from in our brain? Flow is technically defined, though this is a very useful definition, as an optimal state of consciousness, where we feel our best and we perform our best. It is more specifically, any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption, you get so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you're doing, everything else just seems to disappear. Action awareness is going to start to emerge. When that happens, sense of self, self-consciousness is going to get quiet, it's going to diminish.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  Time's going to pass strangely, it'll slow down, you're going to freeze, remember that? Occasionally, more frequently, it speeds up. Five hours go by in like five minutes. Throughout, all aspects of performance, mental and physical, go through the roof. Now, flow has a bunch of core psychological characteristics. When psychologists measure the state, they say, hey, it's got these six core characteristics. I named a bunch of them, but the one you're asking about is the last one, which is the state is autotelic, which is a fancy Greek word that means an end in itself. And what this means is, well, neurobiologically and really plain English, flow is the best we get to feel in the blood, it's the most addictive state on earth, and we will go extraordinarily far out of our way to get more of it.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  And Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Abraham Maslow, William James, myself, a lot of people have made the argument that, hey, pretty much everything we call meaning and purpose and happiness and joy, that we're talking about flow. Csikszentmihalyi has argued that almost everything we think of as art is a flow delivery mechanism for the user. Saleem Ismail, former head of, president of Singularity University, where they study exponential technology and these applications to kind of global challenges, and an old friend of mine, an innovation expert, used to be the head of innovation at Yahoo. He once pointed out, and I wrote about this in Rise of Superman, or Stealing Fire, he said, you know,

• 2:29Speaker 00

  When you think about it, when you pay money, go to a sporting event, you're actually paying money to see people in flow. In fact, if you go to the movies, you're watching actors in flow, poetry reading, it's poets in flow. You go to a restaurant, you want the chef in flow, you want the waiter in flow. If you quantify it, I'll bet it's a large portion of the GDP. And then we quantified it in stealing fire. And we quantified what we called the altered state of economy. How much money do people actually spend to alter their consciousness into these positive feel-good states, flow among others? And it turns out to like, we spend one sixteenth of the global economy chasing altered states of consciousness. So, yes, not only like, do I think it's real, a lot of smart people have thought it's real.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  And if you're simply going by economic numbers, and by the way, we may, you can look at the footnote in stealing fire. There's like a five-page footnote on how we did the calculation. It was the most conservative, we're probably wrong by a factor of 10 because we were so conservative. I'll give you an example. You can make the argument that anytime you go to see live music, you're going to have a flow experience. I want communitas, I want to merge with the band, it'd be one with the audience. But okay, we said, so people, maybe they go to rock concerts or other concerts for all these other reasons. But EDM, there's no lyrics, you're not going for the lyrics. The clubs are disgusting most of the time, you're not going to the big clubs. You're just going to dance and the music, like that's it.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  So we took EDM instead of the whole of the concert, it's true, we just took EDM. And we're still like one sixteenth of the global economy. So you know, I'm super conservative and probably wrong. So yes, is the answer to your question resoundingly.

• 4:09Chris Williamson?

  I love it. You won't know, but I run club nights. So for the last 15 years, I've run some of the UK's biggest club nights. So I've watched this collective effervescence unfold in front of me, right? I've seen the, the.

• 4:23Chris Williamson?

  Dance moves completely done in coordination with people that aren't even in your group without having spoken to them, all that sort of stuff, completely lost in the moment. So yeah, I um, I totally see that. Why does flow exist in the repertoire of human states? Like, why is it adaptive?

• 4:41Speaker 00

  So it's a great question. There's a bunch of different answers. I'll give you three and I'll try to be quick. Answer one, runner's high is a version of flow, right? And in runner's high, you get kind of spaced out while running and you get a lot of pain relief. Anandamide and endorphins both show up, they're powerful painkillers. So here's the idea. We're the only species that evolved to run down our prey. We can outrun distance-wise any species on earth. So any human, back when, who had a little bit of pain relief while running down their prey is going to get more prey, have more meat, healthier kids. That's an evolutionary driver over time

• 5:22Speaker 00

  that goes forward. So that's theory one. A lot of people pretty much think that's where it came from in the first place. Where it's problematic is flow shows up in all mammals. It's not just humans. It's common, can be found in most mammals. Dogs can get into flow, horses can get into flow, there's horse rider flow when you have riders and jockeys and dog trainer flow and like all that stuff happens too. In fact, my first conversation with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow psychology, was my wife and I run an animal sanctuary and I was like, emailed him, I was like, "Look, I think I'm getting into flow with my dogs. Is that shit even possible?" Right? Like, that was my first conversation with him years and years ago, because I was like, "This is crazy. Could this possibly be really..." He's like, "No, no,

• 6:04Speaker 00

  check this out." So the work I did that I wrote about in A Small Furry Prayer, sort of put forth a different idea that a bunch of us sort of think might be true. So humans and dogs co-evolved. About forty thousand years ago, we teamed up with wolves and this was tremendous from an evolutionary perspective. Wolves were like, first of all, they they ate our leftovers. So our camps were clean. They were our garbage disposals. They barked danger. They were our security alarms. They babysat our kids. We'd go off hunting and the wolves would be right on it. They were, where's the term three dog night come from? It's a night so damn cold, you need three dogs or wolves in the bed with you to stay, right? So we cohabitated with wolves. We hunted with wolves. We hunted big prey back in an era where if you got a scratch,

• 6:48Speaker 00

  you could lose your arm and die, right? Like you can't screw up when you're hunting buffalo and there's no hospital or medicine or antibiotics or anything like that. So I don't know if you've ever run with a large pack of dogs. I do that because it's part of the work I do with the animals. If you Google Stephen Collier, the five dog workout, you can see what the work we do with dogs and how it involves a lot of running with a pack of dogs. Outside Television sent a crew to my house years ago to document it. It's funny. You'll laugh. It's about how do you generate flow in animals because flow boosts the immune system and we do hospice care and special needs care. So you can boost the immune system and a bunch of good stuff in animals by getting them into flow. It's not hard. Dogs are hardwired for it. Anyways, but if you go out running with dogs,

• 7:32Speaker 00

  you fricking trip all over each other. I mean, there's spazzes and like it's dangerous. And if you were running down prey and you had other dudes running with you and they had spears, it'd be a fricking mess. But in flow, one of the things that happens is massively heightened pattern recognition, right? And so with crew dynamics, team four, to what you were talking about, the clubs where everybody's dancing the same moves. How does that happen? It happens because in flow, all the brain's information processing systems are jacked up. More information per second, we fast process it faster, find faster connections between incoming information and older ideas. And then we act on it faster and fast twitch muscle response gets amplified and literally we act on it faster. So all that stuff gets way jacked up and when dogs and humans snap into flow together, suddenly everyone's in formation, right?

• 8:17Speaker 00

  That's why we do a lot of flow work with the US Special Forces, the Navy SEALs, even like the National Guard and whatever. They all want the teams in flow because everybody has to, and SEALs, they move non-hierarchical. They're going to storm a building and get back a kidnapped victim. The guy who knows what to do next gets to be the leader. That's how they do it. And there's no time to talk or it's all non-verbal coordination, all through heightened pattern recognition, all done through flow. So.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  That seems like it got into the lineage through Painkiller, but because part of it is you get dopamine and flow and this amplifies pattern recognition, it seems like when we teamed up with Wolves, it was better cooperation, intraspecies cooperation and cross-species flow, and this is a huge driver. So the same thing, little more prey when you were getting into flow and getting Painkiller, but if you're suddenly getting performance-enhancing chemicals and team dynamics and everything else, way more prey, much safer. And so that's the next thing. And there's a current theory, and again, these are not mutually exclusive. This is a theory that I just read and I think it's frickin' brilliant. So to get into flow, what you have to do is,

• 9:26Speaker 00

  flow is what happens when you learn a bunch of different individual skills and they come together. So you're trying to like swing a baseball bat or a cricket bat, right? In the beginning, it's like, keep your eye on the ball and swing with your arms straight and step into the, and it's like 17 different moves. And then boom, it comes together and then booms comes together and it slows down. And suddenly you can twist your wrist a little and put spin on the ball to send it to right field or left field or blah, blah, blah. I'm giving you baseball analogies was probably useless and whatever.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  You get my point and I talk really fast, so I apologize. But that, when we automatize a series of movements and we can now do them as one unique movement without conscious intervention, without the, the new theory is, hey, if that happened, it'd be really good from a brain perspective, if we had a signal. If the body gave us a signal that, hey, this thing you've been trying to learn, you've suddenly, you've got it unlocked. You can now do it no matter what. And flow is your signal. So these are not mutually exclusive things. And one may have led to the other and that led to the other.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  So it's hard to tell. That's the current thinking. And let's say that there's a fourth one, which is, maybe I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. All this could be wrong and two weeks from now, somebody will figure it out, right? So there's, I sound very erudite, but caveat, this is evolutionary theory and nobody, the sciences can only take us so far.

• 11:01Chris Williamson?

  What I think is so interesting there is the interspecies stuff, the fact that you can get yourself into a mode that allows everything, not just everybody, but everything, including the creatures that you're with, to continue to go. And it's cool to think that the sensation of flow is almost like a mastery alert, like a little mastery indicator.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  Right, that's exactly, that's exact, that's all, that's all, I'm stealing that, that's perfect, that's the easiest way to describe it. But yeah, that's essentially, that was a theory, I want to say, I want to give credit where credit is due, I think it's Peter Ulm who came up with it, or Orman Dimenzano, there, one is at Ulm University in Germany, the other is at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and they're brilliant flow researchers. And I think that argument is made, actually, in this book, Effortless Attention, which is a book on, of one of the textbooks on flow, actually.

• 11:57Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference?

• 11:58Speaker 00

  Seven or eight textbook.

• 11:59Chris Williamson?

  I bet you do. What's the difference between peak performance and flow? Is it the same thing?

• 12:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is an interesting, first of all, it depends who you ask, right? It really depends who you ask. I tend to think of peak performance as nothing more or less than, well, first of all, peak performance is just performing at your best in whatever situation you're interested in. But it is, people, I define peak performance as getting your biology to work for you rather than against you, right? And that biology is a limited set of skills. There are a bunch of motivational skills, then there are a bunch of learning skills, there are a bunch of creativity skills, and there are a bunch of flow skills, right? And those are catchall terms. When psychologists say motivation, they don't just mean energy for action, they mean extrinsic motivation, the stuff in the

• 12:49Speaker 00

  world will work hard to get, money, sex, fame, intrinsic motivation, passion, purpose, autonomy, they mean goals and grit. So these are catchall terms. The way to think about that, that suite. It's sort of, it's almost a mnemonic in my mind, but in any situation, motivation gets you into the game, learning allows you to continue to play, creativity is how you steer, right? Creative problem solving, creative decision is how you steer, and then flow is how, because it's a multiple forms, how you amplify the results of those efforts, usually beyond all reasonable expectation, because that's just what flow does, right? If you look at the skills that flow amplifies now, it's motivation, grit, productivity, learning,

• 13:34Speaker 00

  creativity, cooperation, collaboration, right? So empathy and environmental awareness. And you've got to ask yourself, here's the other final answer to your question, why all these skills? Why would one state of consciousness optimize environmental awareness, your ability to see and perceive the natural world, empathy, learning rates, and grit? I mean, like, what are you, and fast twitch muscle response, right? And increased strength 15%, like, what are you talking about? Why? And the answer is really simply, we gave, we talked about a bunch of evolutionary stuff, but here's the high level view. Evolution drove a biology, scarcity drives evolution. Scarcity of resources is the biggest

• 14:15Speaker 00

  driver of evolution. There's only two responses to scarcity. You can fight over dwindling resources, or you can get creative, get cooperative, get innovative, and make new resources. So why does flow optimize all this crap? Because these are the two that it optimizes everything you need to either fight, flee, or get innovative, get creative, get cooperative, and make new resources. So where it came from, there, why didn't it stick around? Big picture.

• 14:44Chris Williamson?

  Before we start to talk about the components of peak performance, is there anything that people need to understand first? Is there like a primer for the primer?

• 14:56Speaker 00

  I don't, there really isn't, the only, um,

• 15:02Speaker 00

  there really isn't, the one thing that I wanna say here, and I don't know if this is true across the board, and more research needs to be done, but we have found that if you're into, I mean, there are some basics and some stuff that like, you know, but all that's covered in "Our Impossible," and this is talked about a little bit in "Our Impossible," but, so there's something called a locus of control. You have an internal locus of control, which means I feel like I am in charge of my life, I can control my destiny, I can control my life, I can control what happens to me, or you have an external locus of control. "I'm a victim, life happens to me, I've got no control here," and, um, sometimes this gets talked about as a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. Um, they're roughly the same terms, but neurobiologically,

• 15:43Speaker 00

  there's a little difference. Either way, if you don't have an internal locus of control, if you think life happens to you, if you're a victim, if you feel like you're a victim, um, it basically shuts off the brain's ability to participate in the world. Basically says, the brain, because the brain is a high-energy organism that always wants to conserve energy. It's 25% of your energy is being used by the brain at rest, it's 2% of your body mass. First order of business for the brain is always conserve energy, conserve energy. So,

• 16:17Speaker 00

  if you think life happens to you and you've got no control in a given situation when a problem arises or things like that, your brain sometimes won't even exert the energy to try, because why bother if you have no control here and are gonna lose anyways, right? We'll save the energy to deal with the fallout later. So, how deep this goes, how much it paralyzes any pursuit of performance remains an open question, but that's the only thing I can think of, that, um, right? That's, that's the one where I think, ooh, we don't have a good answer here. It's like, but considering, especially in America today, because in, there's such a huge social justice movement, thank God, phenomenal, but it produces

• 17:01Speaker 00

  a lot of victim mindset, right? There's a lot of that, and I'm not saying that the social justice causes aren't righteous and true, and the art, like, everything every being saying is right. But from a peak performance standpoint, from a performance standpoint, if you you're a victim, you think life happens to you, you're kind of screwed. And so that's that's, you know what I mean? That's just the biology. And which is funny because it's the biology that's sort of like led some of the social justice argument, right? Some of the argument going on is being biologically led. But the, you know, the argument itself is causing more problems. It's interesting.

• 17:36Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  I don't know what the solution is.

• 17:38Chris Williamson?

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

• 18:19Chris Williamson?

  is that it's a lot more tacit and explicit and and it feels like there's substance behind it. Because there's a lot of, even in psychology.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, there's so, oh, there's just nonsense.

• 18:32Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's a lot, it's like armchair philosophizing, right? About, here's the thing, everybody understands their own experience of when they feel good and when they feel bad. And they could say, well, do you know what it is? Before I, before I give a talk, I always go for a walk and I do that. But you actually understand the stuff that you've done and the work that you've done breaks that down and looks, okay, so what's happening when you walk? What's happening when your eyes are exposed to light and when you're moving and you're going through locomotion whilst thinking and all this sort of stuff? So, yeah, that breakdown there that you've just said, I think, really perfectly identifies why this is so important and different as well.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  So at the Flow Research Collective, right, the organization where we study the neurobiology of peak performance, we have a hardcore philosophy that we sort of live by, which is personality doesn't scale, biology scales. Because what you see is, in coaching, it's exactly what you just said, in self-help, in coaching, you see people who figure out what works for them, and then they teach to other people. And usually it fails, sometimes it's a total disaster. And the reason is really simple. Personality, what works for you, what works for me, my personality was created by my genetics and my early childhood experience. And really foundational stuff that really matters, how you're going to approach peak

• 19:51Speaker 00

  performance, like where are you on the introversion-extroversion scale, and what are your risk tolerances? These are mostly genetically coded or locked in place by early childhood experience. You can change some of them, but it's often very slowly over long periods of time. If you go one level down to the neurobiological mechanism that we all share, well, that scales. The problem with psychology has been, as useful as it is, it's metaphor. Psychology's metaphor, and neurobiology is mechanism. You want it reliable and repeatable, you want neurobiology. Here, Flow is the perfect example. If you go back into the 90s, and you can read this, go read, like, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Susan Jackson, Godfather of Flow Psychology, and the first woman to really try to apply it to sport.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  They wrote a book together called Flow and Sport, and they tried to teach elite athletes using the psychology, how to use flow, and it's not very successful. Their hit rate is pretty lousy, right? And these were literally the two, two of the brightest people in the entire world, and it's not their fault, it's the psychology is squishy. Like, it doesn't, like, what, when you say, my partner, who I write books with sometimes, Peter Diamandis, when he says mindset, he means attitude towards life. When Carol Dweck at Stanford says mindset, she means attitude towards learning, and what she actually means is, no, no, if you have the right attitude toward learning, this part of your brain that allows you to learn turns the fuck on, and this part turns off. That, so like...

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Why do you, what's the la- who cares about the language? What you want is this part of your brain on and this part of your brain off and that's what matters. So let's start there and work, you know, work, work our way up rather than the other way around. Cause it's the other way around. It's just too squishy and it's too subjective and, you know, and you can make a mess of things, real, especially, you know, if your risk tolerances, my risk tolerances are off the chart. I mean, like I'm, my retard is ridiculous. Um, and I run around professional actions, sport athletes and you know, that's what I, that's who I research and hang out with and that's what I do in my free time. And I've got insane risk tolerances and broken 82 bones. So do you want me to, do you want, you want to know what works for me? You know how I get into flow?

• 22:02Speaker 00

  I go skiing the trees at 40 miles an hour, often alone, listening to the Wu Tang Clan at full volume. That's what I do. I mean, like seriously, like what we're going to train other people? Oh yeah. We, I mean, we train a thousand people a month at the Flow Research Collective, right? We, the sea squid of a censure right now is being trained by us. How many of them do you think are gonna wanna ski through the trees at 40 miles an hour? Listen to the Wu Tang Clan?

• 22:30Chris Williamson?

  That would be the best.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  You get my point?

• 22:32Chris Williamson?

  That would be the best induction. You know, the first, the first, uh, this is the flow, the flow collective weekend away. Right? Come on, guys, we're gonna jump on the skis. It's just gonna get you into this right state and then, yeah, dirty pair of pants and a, and a couple of broken bones later. So going into the, the components, you break peak performance down. You said it before, motivation, learning, creativity and flow. And so did Nietzsche, apparently. Why those sections and how do they fit together in that order?

• 23:00Speaker 00

  Everybody, it's everybody. The point is this. Peak performance is nothing more or less than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. As I said, it's a limited set of biology. If you're, so if you're a peak performer, I say this all the time. If you read the art of impossible and you're, let's say you're top 30% of whatever it is you're doing. That could be stamp collecting, right? I don't care. Um. Huge chunks of the book, sixty percent, um, I would say are going to be familiar. There are going to be stuff you're probably doing, right? You may not know what order you're doing it in, or you may go, oh, I'm doing this. I didn't know I should be doing this as part of it, but oh, cool, I get that. Oh, I should do this too. Oh, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  I didn't know about this, right? That's everybody's experience, right? Who's, who's good at their job and is reading this book. Oh, I'm doing some of this. I didn't know it was a system. I didn't know it was designed to work in an order. It's because it's a limited, it's just the biology, right? We're all going in the same direction. We've been doing this really cool project. I'm trying to open source it so we can get, make it huge, but there's been this huge outpouring of peak performance experts who now all have podcasts, including, it turns out, me. Um, and, uh, you can, uh, we want to do an open source project where we like have listeners listen to podcasts and say, okay, this is the podcast. They talked about grit and this was the advice and this was the advice and make a giant matrix about it so we could get all right, like there's brilliant minds who are talking about this

• 24:30Speaker 00

  stuff all the time and lots of people are interested. And so like this kind of crowds towards project to figure out where there's overlap and where's the crazy or where there's a possible new idea that nobody's seen before that is worth examining. This would be really useful, but we started doing that at a, at a lower level at the Flow Research Collective a bunch of years ago. And I started doing it on my own. Just every time I listened to a podcast, I would just like fill out a little grid thing. And it didn't take, like, we're all, it's the same stuff. The only advantage I had in this particular universe, some, a lot of these experts, like there are great books on focus or mindfulness or gratitude or, you know, written by amazing experts and, you know, I'm lucky enough at the Flow Research Collective that a lot of

• 25:13Speaker 00

  these people who have written the books and are the experts, they work with me at the collective. So like, you know, that's, we're a collective of, you know, we try to be the best in the world, um, in this stuff. So that's, that's, that was the goal when I started and we're, we aim for that. Maybe we failed, but that's what we're trying for. So but there's lots of experts in lots of these subjects. I because flow is the big picture. And if you're going to be an expert on flow, well, you better know. I mean, if flow optimizes empathy and environmental awareness and motivation. And like, I better know what the hell I'm talking about on all those subjects. And when I started researching, because I'm a neuro guy, when I started reading about the neuro, how do all these things work? What's going on in the brain? What parts of the brain are getting at? You start seeing, oh, wait a minute. This is all one thing.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  This is all one system. And other people had started putting this together. D C and Ryan are the two big brains in motivation. You kind of did some, a lot of the early work on intrinsic motivation. Ryan went on to write a lot of really cool stuff on intrinsic motivation, the neurobiology. He went, he went from psychology into neurobiology. He wrote a bunch of papers where you can start to see the kernels of the bigger picture starting to emerge a little bit. But um, I don't think he was looking at creativity. Um, but because I was, you know, I run a course called Flow for Writers, where I, you know, it's all this stuff applied to creativity and art and whatever. I was really, I've been for a long time, looking at creativity. How does this stuff apply to creativity?

• 26:43Speaker 00

  And that was, it's a totally different field. It's a totally different world. It gave me, you know. And the learning stuff matters because we train a thousand people a month and you can't, like, you can't train that many people and be bad at it, right? Like, they don't let you. They get mad. I've discovered.

• 27:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I bet that they do. It's um.

• 27:04Chris Williamson?

  I think, I know that you're a fan of David Epstein as well. He's

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, right.

• 27:08Chris Williamson?

  Past guest on the show and learning about the advantage that a generalist has, especially coming out of the, the Henry Ford era, the scientific management, the specialized the workforce. You know, think about what the subtext was that we were being told culturally there. You know, narrow and deep, narrow and deep.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  Um, it's.

• 27:30Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting.

• 27:31Speaker 00

  David's work, yeah, David's work on range.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  When he talks about ranges, brilliant. And it's, you know, it's a, it's not just an argument for generalism. It's an argument for generalism as a path towards what, you know, what economists talk about as match fit, which is a perfect match. It's, I think Adam Grant actually coined the term, or he's the one where David got it. That's where I think it came from. But match fit is a match between your strengths, your values and the work you do in the world. And if you can get match fit, things hyper accelerate, right? Basically, in the book of, in the beginning of Art Impossible, I talk about how do you line up all your intrinsic motivators? How do you get curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery? The big five intrinsic motivators, all pointed in the same direction.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Right? By the end of the stack, you also have to start adding in your strengths and your values. But if you get all that stuff pointing in the same direction, it's rocket fuel, right? It's just, everything goes so much faster. And I think match fit is the like quiet economic term for the same thing. But that's, that's the, the point he's making is, is generalism in search of match fit gives you the best long-term results if you're interested in walking about the mastery. I will also say, I'm Gen X and I don't know, I don't know if this is very true for my generation. I don't know if it was true for the generations that came before me and I'm not quite sure it's still true today.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  But we really wanted to be Renaissance men and women. Like I grew up not just wanting to go deep. I was like, you had to be great. You had to be a good athlete. You'd be a great athlete. You had to be a great artist. You had to be a great kind of intellectual. You wanted to succeed in the business. Like you wanted to kill it everywhere. And that was like, we would, how do you do that? How do you, you know what I mean? It wasn't like, generalism was really weird. And I was an old school punk rocker. And you know, it's a DIY movement. So we were like Renaissance men and women who were going to do it ourselves. We were like, okay, we're going to figure all of it. Like neuroscience, cool. Where do I start reading? You know what I mean? Tennis, cool. Give me a racket, let's go.

• 29:47Chris Williamson?

  What do you think most people have wrong about motivation?

• 29:56Speaker 00

  I think there's two answers here. The first is that, and I think they're related. The first is that people really mystify, especially in today's culture, we mystify passion and purpose. "Oh, it's purpose, it's very altruistic, and let me lead with my purpose." "Hi, I'm Wendy, and I'd like to save the trees in Nepal." Right? I mean, like, Wendy, honestly, if you were saving the trees in Nepal, you wouldn't have to talk to me about it, I would already know, and that's why I'd be talking to you in the first place. If you have to tell me, you're disqualifying yourself as somebody who's actually saving the trees in Nepal. So you're telling me you're taking up space, and like, what? But all that aside, um, did I just say that out loud?

• 30:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  Okay, anyways, that's, uh, it happens. So, passion and purpose matter on a really simple level, because focus is the most expensive thing we spend our energy on. Period. It's the most, when, and if you look at any situation, any performance situation, I don't care what it is you're doing. You want to be a little bit better at work next Monday, or you want to go right after world records. First of all, the biology's the same, and you don't have a lot of levers. What do you, in any situation, bowling. You've got your focus that you're gonna bring to the bowling, and you've got the bowling skills. Now, you can get more bowling skills, that's called practice.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  It takes a very long time, and it goes slowly, and it goes slowly for all of us, and the rules are the same. Crawl, walk, run, right? You're gonna suck until you don't suck, and it's slow. So focus is the big lever. As I said earlier, your brain, 25% of your energy at rest, forget it, you're not even paying attention, at rest, daydreaming mode, um, and about 2% of your mass. So, big energy hog, always looking for kind of ways to conserve, or even better, ways to get something for free. When we are curious about something, when we are passionate about something, when we are purportful about something, we get focus for free. That's the huge deal. We don't have to work so damn hard to pay attention to something, and we're not burning all that energy.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  Focus for free, that's why passion matters, that's why purpose matters. Purpose matters more than passion, because passion, that focus for free, comes in the form of norepinephrine and dopamine. These are feel-good reward chemicals that do double duty as focusing chemicals also. Right? What happens when you go from passion to purpose? Meaning, I take my passion, the thing that I'm most passionate about, and I couple it to a cause greater than myself. So my passion is flow, science, and research. But now I'm going to do flow, science, and research and make the world a better place with my flow, science, and research. The reason I want to do that, it may be that I want to help the world in kumbaya, but from peak performer's perspective,

• 32:45Speaker 00

  I want endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin, which are pro-social feel-good reward chemicals, and they're super motivators. So they're like, we may, the first thing people get wrong is we may, we mystify passion and purpose and think it's all these things. It's not. It's focusing, it's about focus and reward neurochemistry that drives performance. That's what we're talking about. So it's, I think it's helpful to just like bring it back down to the ground. Like this is, the other thing that people really get wrong, and I think this is the big one, is just because you have passion and purpose, it's not gonna feel good.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  Like it's a, like it doesn't mean it's easy, and it doesn't mean it feels good. In fact, one of the hardest things most peak performers discover, is there comes a point in every, everybody's life where the thing you're most passionate about becomes your prison. Right? Like that, writers can get trapped, you know, I've written a couple of books that were really tough. And it's like a two-year hell that you're living inside of. You know what I mean? So it's like, it doesn't mean that I wasn't passionate about the book. It just meant that it was damn hard and, you know, I had to, I had to bang my head into walls a lot.

• 34:02Chris Williamson?

  How did you drag yourself out of that? How do people get out of those roots?

• 34:05Speaker 00

  I just, for me, I just do the work and finish the project. I mean, like, you know what I mean? Like, I don't, all my, like, I don't mind if it's hard. I like, I, you know what I mean? I, I, I ask this question to people all the time, which is, tell me the things in your life that you're proudest of, and that made the biggest difference and led to like the biggest change and like improvement in your performance afterwards. Right? So nobody tells me about the time they got lucky. Right? They tell me, oh, I worked for five years, seven jobs, just to get through college, but I finally got this degree. And like, that's what you hear about.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  Stuart Brand once said, and I think he's not wrong, that the only sustainable happiness is the satisfaction of a job well done. And he's not actually wrong when it comes to happiness. There are three levels of happiness and wellbeing that are available to humans. The first level is moment by moment happiness. How do you feel right here, right now? Which is what Stuart was talking about. And he's probably right there. The next level's up enjoyment and then meaning and purpose all involve flow. So enjoyment is a high-flow lifestyle and meaning and purpose is a high-flow lifestyle where the thing generating flow is attached to something meaningful in the world. And that's the best we get to feel like if you want to find people who score off the charts for overall life satisfaction, wellbeing, the people with the most flow in their lives. And usually that flow is coming from something tied to something greater than themselves.

• 35:32Chris Williamson?

  The interesting thing from that is being selfless is oddly the most selfish thing that you can do. By serving other people, you serve yourself.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  So here's the funny thing, and there's an inversion of that, which is also true, which is equally weird.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  So flow and a bunch of other alternate states experiences, including psychedelic experiences, the ego, the self disappears. But on the back end of these experiences, right? The ego comes like roaring back. Have you ever met more blowhards than are like existing in the psychedelic community right now? Like how many bro bra morons with a philosophy about, you know, take mushrooms, find God, beat drums, have lots of sex? Like, really? Okay, cool. I was in high school too. I didn't know that was a philosophy. Let's go.

• 36:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so being selfless is one of the most selfish things you can do, but also destroys the self and then can cause it to come back greater than it ever was before.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  Which, you know, we have a t-shirt, we don't have much swag at the Flow Research Collective. We have a t-shirt that says, "Never trust the dopamine." Because the big ego high comes with the dopamine and you want the dopamine for focus, for energy, for drive. But if you start actually believing what it's telling you, the message it's telling you, oh my God, you'll make all kinds of disastrous decisions. I'll give you, we tell people also like flow, patterns, pattern recognition. We talked about that. So like common sense, don't go shopping in a flow state. You will buy everything. You'll be like, you'll have a great idea to single handedly reinvent seventies polyester disco fashion. Ha, ha, ha, staying alive. Right? I mean, you're gonna come home and you're gonna

• 37:19Speaker 00

  be like, I bought what? I bought what?

• 37:22Chris Williamson?

  You're gonna be disgusted with yourself.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  Honey, I, I, I, I've asked out the visa. You'll never believe why.

• 37:30Chris Williamson?

  Oh my God. Yeah, that's so interesting. I've never thought that flow actually could be a, being in a flow state could be misappropriated into a, an imperfect environment and put you on the back foot.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  We write about it in the fire, but like, so a couple of things about flow. A lot of stuff is amplified, but you just watch the prefrontal cortex from the brain are shut down. Prefrontal cortex handles logical, complex decision making, long-term planning, does some risk assessment. So I tell people that like, if anybody, like, there's a cult leaders put people in the flow. If somebody like puts drop, helps you get into flow and then tries to make meaning for you, run the other way. You're in a cult. Like, get, that's like, you, you gotta, this is, this is a powerful technologies. There's a whole bunch of people in the self-help world who put people into flow using various techniques,

• 38:28Speaker 00

  you know, and then upsell them. Hey, you feel how good that is? Check out my new platinum level superstar turbo program.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Right? Risk assessment is off, long-term planning is shut down. That, like, there's an argument that that should be illegal, right? Like, there is an argument for that. Um, uh, but the, my, my point is like, flow is a tool, right? It's ethically neutral, be used for good, it can be used for ill. In fact, you go back to the 1950s and you, you can take your pick on if this is good or ill, but the 50s flow literature is all about combat flow. It's about soldiers in World War II and group flow situations and, you know, and things like that. So, um, you know, I always say that a cat burglar, when they're stealing your jewels, they're definitely in flow.

• 39:21Chris Williamson?

  That's a good point.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  You know.

• 39:22Chris Williamson?

  You start the creativity section off with a quote from Salvador Dali that says, "I don't do drugs, I am drugs." What does that mean to you?

• 39:31Speaker 00

  I love that quote. I love that quote. I've thought a lot about that quote. Um, I think what Dali was getting at was that he was trying to describe reality from a phenomenological perspective, reality as we actually experience it, right? He was talking about elongated time, so his clocks were stretched. Time elongates in flow. So like, a lot of the stuff that he was trying to get at, the phenomenology, I think is in and around altered states of consciousness. I think what, uh, what Dali meant is that experiencing his art was transformative in that way.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  And there's something interesting about that because, you know, the empathy is, the study of empathy as a psychological, as a scientific topic is this, is this question? Where, where the origins of empathy science was art. How is it that you look at a painting and suddenly you feel the thing the artist was feeling when they painted the painting? How the hell does that work, right? It's an emotion transported through an object into another person? Okay, yeah, and how'd that work exactly? Like, what are we talking about here? That was, that was where early research into empathy came from. They were trying to figure out, how does that possibly work? And Dali...

• 40:55Speaker 00

  That was work that was really getting a lot of attention in the late 1870s, 80s and 90s. So I'm guessing Dali at least encountered it. Um, I don't know his exact dates, but I'm guessing he bumped up against it. I mean, 1920s, he was painting heavily, maybe 10s. I'm guessing like he's in art school in the 1890s or early, you know, and they're talking about this stuff. I'm guessing I could, you know what I mean? I could be wrong. That's what I, that's my semi erudite guess, or I'm possibly Steven talking out of his butthole.

• 41:30Chris Williamson?

  Perhaps, yeah. I am, I did so much research for a recent talk I gave and I used Dali as one of the examples. So I did a, a full deep dive on the guy. I cannot believe how eccentric he was. I absolutely cannot believe the depths of his eccentricity.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  I, he hadn't been well, that whole group of people. I, it's interesting to me. First of all, I always point out that like Europeans are very quiet and stayed and generally uptight until they decide not to be. And then get the hell out of the way, just get out of the way.

• 42:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Everything's, everything's up for sale, isn't it?

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Everything's, everything's fair game, everything. Like you take really repressed cultures with long cultural histories that are really like set in stone. And then, you know, we, we have, I, I think of it. So in science, there's this really weird things that happens where if you have a scientist who happens a lot, you see in physics more than anything else. They suddenly, they discover, they start, they get interested in something that science has said is not possible. And they, you know, start poking at it and it's suddenly possible. And this can be flow science or things like that. But suddenly like it opens the door, like once they believe in one thing that might be a little bit controversial.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  Suddenly, everything's fair game and the entire, like, all the critical thinking that they brought to every step of their career seems to go out the window at that minute. Like, 10 minutes ago, you were a really smart, smart biologist, and suddenly we're talking about quantum wormholes.

• 43:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  Like, what the hell happened? Like, and can I smoke some too?

• 43:11Chris Williamson?

  That's what we need. Yeah, it's, um, did you know that, I'm gonna guess that you will have done, did you know that Dali was named Salvador because his younger brother died nine months before he was born? And his parents believed that he was the reincarnation of his dead brother?

• 43:32Speaker 00

  That's not too much weight to bear. I mean, you know, that's not unfair expectations for a child. It's okay.

• 43:39Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what he did with his?

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Hey, Sal, Sal, let me tell you about your brother, your dead brother.

• 43:45Chris Williamson?

  The you are, the one that you are. Yeah, exactly.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  The one you are, by the way. This is, so you got Dali and the Dalai Lama. I got it. If you're named Dali, you're the reincarnation of.

• 43:57Chris Williamson?

  That's it. The, um, the other one, the best thing that I heard, so he married, he left his first marriage for another one that he was having an affair, this lady was having an affair with. And he referred to her as his muse. He said that this is the woman who is supplying me with all of my artistic inspiration. And upon getting married, he bought her a castle, immediately started treating her like monarchy, like immediately did. And then didn't move into the castle he'd purchased her. He sent her formal requests by letter to be able to see her in the castle that he'd bought her.

• 44:33Chris Williamson?

  And she had to respond. So he was treating her like some sort of sacred, royal, this heritage, this completely like unprofane area. And, um, yeah, he, he literally treated her like a goddess incarnate.

• 44:50Chris Williamson?

  What a guy.

• 44:54Chris Williamson?

  I know.

• 44:55Speaker 00

  Like I don't know what to do with it.

• 44:57Chris Williamson?

  I don't know what to do with that. That's amazing.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  So maybe he meant something different by I am drugs than like, maybe he was going much farther than.

• 45:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you think that you know Dali. Dali's beyond our mere mortal comprehension, I think.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. More researchers need is Stephen.

• 45:19Chris Williamson?

  Precisely. Exactly right. We've now got the Dali Research Collective, which is going to be a sub-discipline. So going back to creativity, going back to the Dali thing, how can people hack their creativity?

• 45:31Speaker 00

  So what's interesting, again, this is one of these cool things where, you know, back in the 20th century, we were trying to use the psychology of creativity to train creativity and we weren't great at it. The hit record in the 20th century was really up and down. Sometimes we were good, sometimes we were really bad and we couldn't figure out why. And now we're starting to understand, first of all, creativity is less so much, it's a skill. It's also a state of consciousness, right? There's state changes in the brain when we're creative. And we're now starting to understand the neurobiology. So like,

• 46:08Speaker 00

  simple things make a really big difference. I'll give you one kind of like bit of neurobiological information that is often the ballgame with creativity, which is anxiety. So the more anxious you become, the more logical your brain gets. The more fear there is in the situation, the more your brain wants, give me something safe, something tried, something true, something that works every time, reliable, more people. Extreme example, if I'm acute anxiety, you get the fight or flight response. Forget about options. The buffet is closed. You can fight, you can flee, or you can freeze. I'm giving you three choices, right? That's an extreme situation, but the same thing happens with any levels of anxiety.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  A little bit is good. A little bit of focus attention, it'll get you curious, it'll move you along, but too much and you have all kinds of problems. The issue, if we're going to be a little more formal, is the... Dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is a part of your brain, does a bunch of really interesting things. One of the things it does is it finds remote associations between ideas. So when your brain, creativity is always your comp, or your brain takes a novel information and it finds an older link to that new information, right? And uses the new thing that comes out of the two things being blended together to create something startling. That's essentially creativity at a really basic level.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  But when you're scared, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex goes, well, dude, I don't wanna associate this thing that I do, you know, this bit of novelty in the environment with like what your grandmother said to you back in sixth grade. Because no, this thing could be dangerous and you're already stressed out because of this thing at work. And you're tired, you don't have a lot of energy, so no, no, no. Being in a good mood really matters because when you're in a good mood, the ACC is calmer and it can find farther flung connections between ideas. This is why if you're interested in more creativity, if you wanna train your nervous system, the best tools to reach for are either a daily gratitude practice, a daily mindfulness focused meditation practice, or 20 to 40 minutes of daily exercise.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  Those are the three best ways to flush stress hormones out of your system. So when we train people, we're like, you have to have some level of calmness to do any peak performance. We say, pick one, do a five-minute gratitude practice or a 11 minutes of focused meditation, focused breath work, or 20 to 40 minutes of exercise. If there's crisis stuff going on in the world or COVID and people are stressed out, do two of these things a day. It'll keep your nervous system in check enough. This flow is a high-energy state. We all wanna get into flow, that's gonna, that's gonna be the secret to unlocking everything. But the calmer, it's not the calmer you are, but the calmer you're sort of starting from as you're, you're entering the thing, the better.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  And one of the big reasons for flow, also for creativity. There's a bunch of other way, other things like that, but that's just a simple example. That's sort of what the new science of creativity is about.

• 49:15Chris Williamson?

  How close is that window from doing the action, the daily habit? Is it best for you to do the meditation or the exercise and then within six hours, sit down to do your work?

• 49:28Speaker 00

  Oh, I don't.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  That's an interesting question.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  I think it depends on where you are at the time. For example, um, when I wake up and I'm stressed out, sometimes I'll like, you know, I like to write first thing in the morning. That's when I work best and focus best. But if I've come to work stressed out, I will do a gratitude practice, right? I'll write down 10 things I'm grateful for and really try to feel each one of them.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  If I'm not stressed out when I come to work and I don't get a chance to exercise during the day, I'll end my day with a gratitude practice just so I can make sure I've sort of like reset my emotions before I go like deal with my wife and talk to my wife and like, you know, I don't want to like spill my bad day all over her that, you know, so I'll, I'll tune up my nervous system that way, that kind of thing. So I think it depends on sort of where you are, how you are and, and what the situation is.

• 50:27Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to guess for most people, um, some of the things that you've talked about would probably be part of a morning routine. Most people also.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  I think, I think that's true. I like to, I literally like less than seven minutes from the time I like roll out of the bed to the time I'm like.

• 50:43Chris Williamson?

  Is that right? What do you, I always wondered, do you have a little tune up sequence before? Let's say it's a normal day. Steven wakes up, gets out of bed and he's feeling just good out of 10, normal out of 10.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  Go to the bathroom, make my bed, walk from my house to my office, bring my dogs along the way, put a cup, put a pot of coffee on, usually do my gratitude practice while the coffee is brewing. And then I, then I write, then I start writing and I'm usually writing within five minutes.

• 51:13Chris Williamson?

  I find that interesting that you're.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  I, well, the reason is this flow, among other flow is great for creativity. It's great for writing. That's my goal when I'm writing. Flow takes place on the borderline from a brainwave perspective between alpha and theta. So waking, normal waking consciousness is beta. It's a fast-moving brainwave. Alpha is daydreaming mode. It's a slower brainwave. It's more associated with heightened creativity. And then theta is rem sleep, right? It's right there. Flow is the borderline between alpha and theta. It's a very, it's actually a calm from a brainwave perspective, a very calm state. This is this decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex that we were talking about. That's how it registers. You wake up in alpha. You don't wake up.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  You will jump, your brain will jump up to beta once it starts racing, but you wake up mostly in alpha. And unless you're, you know, having a bad dream or, you know, there's a lot of other things that could happen as general, you're waking up at alpha. It's easier to stay there and, you know, drop down to the theta borderline with flow than it is to like get kicked into high beta. And that's why I try to do it.

• 52:26Chris Williamson?

  I think that's really interesting. It's cool to use something that you're going to do every day as a, your pre-workout before work is your sleep. I think that's a good way, a good way to put it together. What are the things that, most common ways that you see people knocking themselves out of flow? What are like the antitheses that people get into on a daily basis?

• 52:52Speaker 00

  Let me solve that for you a slightly different way. If you go to www.floeblocker.com, we built the diagnostic. There are six major ways most people get knocked out of flow. And distraction, for example, is a big one. There's a bunch of others. Anyways, we built the diagnostic. It's free for anybody and it will tell you this is the thing that's standing between you and the most flow and give you a bunch of actionable steps to solve that problem in your life. So that work, we've done that work for people. That's free. We can jump to the next one.

• 53:32Chris Williamson?

  I love that. That's so, that's awesome. So let's talk about some flow triggers then. So flow triggers are these sort of proximal causes of flow itself and they're split up into internal and external. What are some of your favorites? What do you think people need to learn about if they're new to this topic?

• 53:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, so.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  Flow states, as you pointed out, they've got triggers. These are preconditions that lead to more flow. There are 22 known flow triggers. There are probably way more, but that's what we know about. There are 12 that fall into the individual category, what'll drive me into flow or you into flow. And then there's 10 group flow triggers, right? What me and you together in a flow state, interpersonal flow, or a brainstorming session, group flow, or, you know, communitas flow at scale, that's a rock concert, that kind of thing. But so there are 10 triggers for group flow. They all work the same way. Flow follows focus. It only shows up when all of our attention's in the right here, right now. So that's what the triggers do. They drive our attention into the present moment. They do it a bunch of different ways.

• 54:33Speaker 00

  They can either drive dopamine and norepinephrine into our system. We talked about those earlier. They're focusing chemicals, the performance enhancing chemicals. Sometimes the triggers will drive both into your system, sometimes it's just one, or the triggers will lower cognitive load. Cognitive load is all the crap you're trying to think about any one time. So by lower cognitive load, I liberate some extra energy and you can repurpose that for attention. So that's how the triggers work. Though, the most important one, and the one I love the most, I think, because it's often called the golden rule of flow, is what's known as the challenge skills balance. This is the idea that, this is, by the way, the exact, is a great follow-up to what we're talking about, because this is another reason why anxiety blocks flow.

• 55:16Speaker 00

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

• 55:40Speaker 00

  For the, because you have to stretch beyond your comfort zone. So for flow hacking, you gotta sort of get comfortable being uncomfortable. For like Uber top performers, right? When I'm dealing with like C-suite executives or go Wall Street type A types, the problem is that they blow by this skill set because they're used to taking on giant challenges and, and they, it's not, you, you should not, you shouldn't take on the giant challenges, that you should chunk it down. So the part you're dealing with, that's right in front of you, that's right here, right now, that you're focused on, sits in that, that sweet spot. So if I were to say this emotionally, I'd say, hey, that's the sweet spot. It's not on, but it's pretty close to near the midpoint between anxiety, too much stimulation, whoa, turn it off, and boredom, not enough stimulation,

• 56:24Speaker 00

  I, I can't pay any attention. In between is the sweet spot, what is psychologically referred to as the flow channel, or physiologically, the Earp's Dopson curve. Either way, too much anxiety in your system, right? For any other reason, and it's too much norepinephrine, and it turns up the challenge to the sweet spot. So it makes it harder, because you're already pushing your skills to the utmost. And if you're super anxious, as you know, it's really hard to push your skills to the utmost. I, yeah, I was skiing yesterday. I was thinking about this very thing, because I spent a lot of time skiing, and a lot of time trying to progress my skiing. And we were in the terrain park yesterday, working

• 57:06Speaker 00

  pretty hard, but we had skied really hard, man, guy skied with a lot, the day before, and made a lot of progress. And yesterday, we were exhausted, I was exhausted, he was exhausted, and everything looked terrifying to me. Because I was tired and I couldn't, my legs weren't popping. I couldn't do the things I was doing, and stuff that I'd been doing the day before, I was like, oh my God, this is so scary. I don't want to do this. And I literally had been doing it the day before, like, without even thinking about it, not even like worried. And yesterday, I was terrified. I was laughing at myself. I was like, this is amazing, that like perception can radically shift from day to day. But that's the challenge skill sweet spot. It's a movable, you know, it's a movable feast. So that's my favorite.

• 57:49Chris Williamson?

  How concerned are you that a lot of knowledge workers and people that are contributing at the moment and want to be in flow are in an environment with always on communication and open plan workspaces or Slack messaging channels and stuff like that, which is directly-

• 58:09Speaker 00

  I return them I am that, yeah, like that there's that we've created a world that is significantly like anti-flow.

• 58:18Chris Williamson?

  Well, you've said the precursor to flow is focus and focus is incredibly scarce.

• 58:23Speaker 00

  Open office plans are very problematic. Endless communication can be very problematic. You know, I, people always say, what's the one flow trigger I could, like, what should I start with? And I always say the best thing, what our, what our research has shown is start your day with 90 minutes of uninterrupted concentration devoted to your hardest task or start your work session. You should start your work session in accordance with your circadian rhythms. I'm an extreme lark, 4 a.m. My wife's a night owl, 4 p.m. is when she starts to wake up and she's not really awake till 9 p.m. Right? So work, if you can work in conjunction with your, your basic bio rhythms, really great. Fantastic.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  And try to block 90 minutes of uninterrupted concentration at the front end of that period. Now, 90 minutes is very particular. The human brain evolved to focus in 90 minute cycles. And same, we've got like a 90 minute REM cycle that you've probably heard about. We've got a 90 minute waking cycle where we're awake and we're focused and we're alert. Montessori education is very high flow education. When they go to, kind of measure flow in educational environments, Montessori education in Waldorf schools go off the charts. Why is that? Well, one of the main reasons is they divide the workday into 90 minute blocks of uninterrupted concentration. Self-directed learning for 90 minute blocks and they get tremendous results because the human brain is biologically hardwired for 90 minutes. We're good at it.

• 59:45Speaker 00

  So it doesn't take a shit ton of training to learn how to focus for that period of time, once you turn everything else off. And after, you know, as I said, we train about a thousand people a month. I've been, I've probably, my staff figured out, I have no idea if this is right, but let's, let's just even say it's in the ballpark of right, between the people I've spoken to and trained, I've trained over a quarter million people. It's a lot of people. So it's a big data set. And the thing that matters seems to make the biggest difference for most people is- 90 minute block about an hour of concentration and we talked about the challenge skills balance. How do you approach the task that you're gonna do in that 90 minute block? You push that task to the edge of your abilities.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  So when I'm writing in the morning, I'll give you a really simple example, so this is an atmospheric. I've got 90 minutes. When I start writing a book, I try to write 500 words a day. Why 500? Because 350 I can do easily. That's not a problem. But 500 words means I've got one idea and now I've got to connect it to the next and I gotta write a transition. And transitions, as anybody who's ever written a book will tell you, are the bitch, right? They're hard. And so 500 words, it's I'm stretching myself, I'm not snapping. When it's the middle of a book and I sort of know a little bit more of what I'm doing and where I'm going, it's 750 words. At the end of a book, it's 1,200. So it moves every day, but I've got my 90 minute block and I know what I'm gonna do with it

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  because it's based on the challenge skills, you know, balance. You can apply that to anything in your life and those are like, people are always like, well, where do I start? Where do I start? Where do I start? That's where you start, I think. And if your nervous system is running hot, add in daily mindfulness, gratitude and, you know, inspiration. And yes, I, let me say the final thing that I have to say now, which is the caveat, which is like, I get that everything I'm talking about is very simple and very straightforward. I like to point out that I like, I don't like whiz bang technologies and I don't like substances.

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  Primarily because I want something that works every time in every situation. There are a lot of crisis situations, peak performance situations where there's no time to reach for a substance or a, you know, or a technology or whatever, but that said, that's the good news. The bad news is, nothing I talk about, if you talk about it in a bar on Friday night, it's gonna get you laid. Like it won't get, it's not sexy. It's not sexy. Dude, I am, I got, I got a 90 minute block of uninterrupted concentration and I'm pushing on the challenge skills balance. You wanna come home with me?

• 1:02:19Chris Williamson?

  Have you considered doing like the Flow Dating Collective?

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  I know, right? No, but the best part is, uh, this is even funnier. So Art of Impossible comes out, right? My, the new book comes out and I think I'm on a podcast very early on, very early, like before the book's even out. And I say, and I don't even know what podcast I'm on. I must be on a dating podcast that I don't even know how I got on. But I say, look, I think the first impossible that most people sort of go after in their life is remember being like 11, 12, 13 years old and like wanting your first kiss or your first girlfriend or boyfriend or a relationship. And it was a total impossible. Like you had no, I 12 years old, I would have given you my arm or at least a finger, right?

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  For that information. Um, it was such an impossible. And I was like, this is, I think, the first, like people hear about the art of possible and they're like, no way, man. I'm not interested. I don't, well, you do it all the time, right? And here's the first example in your life. And I gave that example. So why this is funny and why I'm telling you is that the first time Art of Impossible hit a bunch of like top Amazon bestseller lists, um, early on, the first one it hit was mating. And I like, I was like, how the hell did my book become number one? I was number one in mating. I was like, well, what the hell is mating? Like, what does that even mean? I was, relationships are a different category. Mate seeking, that was it. It was mate seeking. I was

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  like, relationships is its own category. What could possibly, what is mate seeking? And who at Amazon was smoking what when they come up with mate seeking? Like, I don't like, were the anthropologists getting stoned? Like, what happened there? I'm not, I don't get it.

• 1:04:05Chris Williamson?

  So funny, man. Yeah, it's so bizarre when you see where you, where your work ends up. One thing that I've heard you talk about before, which I'm gonna be remiss if I don't bring it up, is about the importance of keeping our word to ourselves.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  Thank you for bringing that up. I think it's such, um,

• 1:04:25Speaker 00

  It's such a simple concept.

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  Alright, so let's back up one step. I realize that we're gonna have... Art Impossible is the peak performance primer. There's a bunch of onboarding stuff that you have to do. But by all said and done, at the end of the book, if you're really interested in peak performance and leveling up your game,

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  there's about six things you want to do every day and about seven things to do every week. And the six things, we've been talking about some of them, mindfulness, gratitude, or exercise, a 90-minute block for an interview. These are things that anybody can do. The point is that

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  it's about doing them today, doing them tomorrow, doing them that reliable, repeatable, that's what really matters because peak performance really does its best work like compound interest. Right? That's where you really get the big benefits. Put simply, peak performance is a checklist.

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  And what I always tell people is, when I put something on a checklist, like when I, at the end of every day, I make up a checklist for what I'm doing the next day. When I put it on the checklist, I'm making a promise to myself that I'm doing this tomorrow. Right? You can... We think a lot, we talk a lot about transparency, not lying, honesty, keeping our word to other people. And I'm not saying that's unimportant, but I'm saying that is far less important than keeping your word to yourself. The most important thing is if you say it out loud, if you say you're gonna do it, it's a promise. It's a, you've said it to the world, you put it into the world, now you do it. If it goes on the list, now you do it. It's not

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  debatable. And if it stops being debatable,

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  so much, uh, it just gets so much easier. I, oh, I like, I like to tell my friend, uh, I was, it's funny, I was talking to my editor, my, I'm lucky enough that my editor is my best friend and we've worked together for 25 years. And, uh, we work together all the time. And he, we were talking the other day and he, he said, you said something to me once about this very topic. He said, that really stuck with me. And I said, okay, what did I say? Oops. Um, he said, he said, it's funny, he said, when you write the list, um, you're one person and when you're... Acting out the checklist, you're somebody else and you sit to me like, I just work for the boss. The boss is the guy who wrote the list, you know, I'm showing up today and I'm working for the boss. The boss says, this is the list, that's the list, that's the boss, I'm work, because you don't wanna work for present tense self.

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  Present tense self is like, fuck it, man, where's the bourbon, right? Like hookers and cocaine, man. You know, past tense self is like, no, man, if you really wanna get the most out of tomorrow, you're gonna go to the gym in the morning. You're gonna start your day with ninety, right? Like, you don't wanna work for present tense self unless you have some kind of like amazing level of like willpower kung fu. You think about it, like you, you work for past tense self, the person who made the checklist and you keep your word to yourself. And it is, it's a muscle. But if you get good at it, it's amazing. I'll tell you, I will say, here's the difficulty with it.

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  And it's not a personal difficulty, it's a, I say this to everybody I work with. And everybody comes into my company, everybody I work with and I say, look, I am not normal in one particular way, which is everything I, if I say it out loud, I'm gonna do it. It's a promise and I mean it, but if you say it out loud to me, I think it's a promise and you're gonna do it no matter what. So if you work with me, you have to understand that if you say it out loud and you don't do it, we're not gonna work together anymore. Like that to me is you just broke a promise and I can't trust you and we're done. Um, unless, you know, we talk about it along the way and you tell me why you're breaking this promise, you know what I mean? That kinda thing.

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  Um, and I find it can be, that is, it's a difficult, it's, it's funny, it's the best peak performance muscle I can think of. And it's great to develop, but if you do develop it, the real world sometimes gets pretty weird because most people don't play that way.

• 1:08:26Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I absolutely love "I'm just working for the boss." That is fantastic.

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

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

• 1:08:55Chris Williamson?

  I love it when, I love it when so many things come together like that. You're totally correct. You've got the, um, the third party perspective in there, which is actually distancing you from stuff. What you've done is you've separated out the planning and the execution self, which is allowing you to go from system two, uh, system one to system two thinking. And Daniel Kahneman speak, and you've got, oh, I've got my more abstract goals. I can actually make my planning. And then when you get into it, it allows you to get into flow. I imagine long-term planning in flow probably sucks quite a bit.

• 1:09:24Speaker 00

  So it's interesting, so it's interesting. It's, that's not true, but it's really complicated why, um, long-term. So a couple of things. One, why does time pass so strangely in flow? Let's start there because this is going to make sense. Time is a calculation performed all over the prefrontal cortex. Parts of it start to shut down for these efficiency exchanges, right? The brain needs more energy. It says, okay, we're going to shut down non-critical structures, liberate some energy. That's why the prefrontal cortex turns off. Time, it's a network effect, like any network, the nodes go down, brain can't separate past from present from future. So we're crushed into this thing called the deep now. So what is problem in flow? Couple of things are really amazing.

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  So first of all, long-term planning is great because you can see farther into the future. Normally, human time horizons are about six months. Literally like we evolved in an era where like winter's coming, oh shit, I gotta find a cave. That, we gotta follow the harvest, like that sort of stuff. There was work by Jay McDonigal that said that most people have a 10-year time horizon and that's like the hard and fast block. And in fact, when we, one of my organizations, Planet Home, we help big companies basically become very, very environmentally friendly at a really deep level. And we do it by retrocasting. We say, okay, what is the world you want to live in in 2035? And if that's the case, what has to happen in 2033, 31, right?

• 1:10:54Speaker 00

  And because of those time horizons. So in flow, we don't have those time horizons. You can see much farther in the future. In fact, then there's a bunch of other reasons. So that's really up. Here's the problem. In flow, you can, like a composer will have a symphony, it'll pop into his head, he'll see it in flow and he'll think, oh dude, it's gonna take me like two weeks, I'll just get back, I'll write it, you know what I mean? It's all fine, or I'll have a book idea and I'll be like, oh, I'll write this thing in two months, I got this. And then you like drop out of flow when time is no longer impressed and you're like, holy crap, this is a 15-year project, right? Like what am I talking about? And that's really demotivating for a lot of people. Like it's funny, but it's really demotivating.

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  So, long-term planning in terms of, you want to be cautious about like risk assessments and things like that. So like, people go to Burning Man, they get into flow, they decide, oh, the now is so much more important than the then, I'm gonna cheat on my wife because I'm having this sacred experience, right? Like that's the kind of stuff where long-term planning goes away, right? Like that, those kinds of situations, yeah. But there's a certain kind of like entrepreneurial or artistic long-term planning where like, every one of my books have appeared to me in one version or another in flow and then I've steered towards that. It takes a very long time, right?

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  So the flow is sort of, it's great for the intuition, the inspiration, but I always tell people, I'm like, you have to understand there's an order to the process. Inspiration, research, publication, communication. Meaning, have your inspiration, do your research.

• 1:12:35Speaker 00

  Publish it in some way, meaning take it public and let other people, smart people bang on your idea and tell you if you're right or you're wrong. And then stand up on a stage to write a book and say, okay, here's the facts. Too many people have the inspiration and then write the book and I'm like, or start talking about it. You know what I mean? I'm like, you just came back from a flow experience and you're now going to tell me about God, the universe and ever, I mean, like what? Like, get thee to the library.

• 1:13:02Chris Williamson?

  That's so funny. It's so funny that flow is, is kind of like a, like a mental disorder within particular domains. It's almost like a, um, a misappropriation of your mental faculties.

• 1:13:14Speaker 00

  It, it's fantastic for a lot of stuff, but it, there's, there's places where it gets a little wonky. And I mean, and it just doesn't go a little bit of wonky. I mean, of course it's optimal performance. So you just expect when optimal performance goes wonky, it's gonna go.

• 1:13:32Chris Williamson?

  Goes wonky fast and hard. Yeah.

• 1:13:34Speaker 00

  It's gonna go fast and hard and, and it's true. I mean, it's funny because, you know, in stealing fire, we write about Jerusalem syndrome. So Jerusalem syndrome is what happens when people go to Jerusalem and there's so, so complexity, which is overwhelming. When the brain encounters information, there's too much information to process by the conscious mind has to sort of kick it over. You have an awe experience. So that's often geological time, right? You stand at the Grand Canyon, you, you think you're looking, or look at the night sky and you're looking back in time. Those kinds of experiences, well, people go to Jerusalem and they have historically based awe experiences. And they often come down with Messiah complexes. They think they're Jesus or Moses or Abraham.

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  It's called Jerusalem syndrome and it's a flow, it's a flow triggered altered state of mental illness. Time is compressed, ego is huge, right? All this history, it's literally like we write about it's a known, it's like a known psychological disorder. Really routine, people show up in, you know, at the hospitals in Jerusalem all the time. By the way, it's not just Jerusalem. So.

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  The Grateful Dead used to have a guy on staff who looked like Jerry. And he would walk around all the people who would go to Dead concerts and take acid and decide that they were Jerry or decide they had to talk to Jerry. And Jerry, only Jerry could understand them. So they got a guy who looked like Jerry, who would go around Rock Med, where they took all the people having bad trips and say, I'm Jerry. What do you, what, what, what do you do? I was in that damn camp one day. I never went to see the Dead, but uh, somebody, uh, I went to a concert. Dylan and a bunch of people were playing. One of the guys I was with that didn't even know him overdosed on acid. Tried to take his clothes off and he's running around the Oakland Coliseum. We're chasing him.

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  The cops are chasing us. Rock Med is chasing the cops, right? All to get the naked guy who thinks he's Jerry. And so like, I'm not even on drugs, right? I'm just like, I don't, who is this guy? What's wrong with him? I get taken to the tent in the basement and I'm just sitting down there like, can I please go upstairs and watch the damn show? I don't even like the Dead that much, but like, I want to see Dylan. And this guy who looks like Jerry comes up to me, puts his hand on me. He's like, are you okay? I'm Jerry. Is there something you need to tell me? I was like, you're not fucking Jerry.

• 1:16:00Chris Williamson?

  Go away surrogate, surrogate Jerry.

• 1:16:02Speaker 00

  Sorry Jerry. I was like, where's my goddamn concert? Get me out of acid lockup. This is no good.

• 1:16:09Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, that's so funny, man. Yeah, the um, the Grateful Dead, I watched, I listened to a podcast series. It's an awesome podcast series about the Grateful Dead. Uh, and about all of the history and the different stuff that they got themselves into. It was so good. As a final thing.

• 1:16:25Chris Williamson?

  Go ahead.

• 1:16:25Speaker 00

  Please. No, no, go ahead. Yours.

• 1:16:28Chris Williamson?

  As a final suggestion, let's say that there's somebody who's listening, who doesn't necessarily have that, that hobby or that passion that allows them to stretch their skills and do this. Is there a easy to complete?

• 1:16:45Speaker 00

  Yep, for sure.

• 1:16:45Chris Williamson?

  Drop into flow practice that people can do tomorrow?

• 1:16:50Speaker 00

  Well, everybody has a primary flow activity. This whatever that's, that's whatever you did from the time you were like a little kid to now, that is deeply absorbed. For some people, it's reading, or walking in nature, or dancing to hip hop, or dancing salsa, or skiing, or you know, for me, it's skiing. Everybody's got their own thing. And what's interesting is, as we become adults, these are the very things we stop doing. Right? Like, put away childish things, we're responsible now. I'm not gonna surf anymore, I'm not gonna skate anymore, I'm not gonna play my guitar. And from a performance perspective, that's a disaster, and there's three reasons why. One, flow is essentially a focusing skill. So, the more flow you get, the more flow you get.

• 1:17:35Speaker 00

  If I go skiing on Monday and drop into flow, and then I go to work Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday, you'll get more flow, because you're training the brain how to focus. Two, as we move into flow, all the stress hormones get pushed out of our system. There's a global release of nitric oxide, there's a gas signaling molecule, it's everywhere in the body, it pushes stress hormones out of our system, resetting the nervous system towards zero. So, we talked about all the problems with anxiety for performance. Flow automatically flushes that stuff out of your system. Also, massive heightening of creativity and productivity in flow, and there's research that shows, definitely on the creativity, productivity is a maybe, but the creativity, the heightening creativity will outlast a flow state by a day, maybe two, and the thing,

• 1:18:19Speaker 00

  same thing may be true for productivity. The creativity research was done by Teresa Mobley at Harvard, and productivity we've been working on, at the Flow Research Collective. So, you get productivity and creativity that's gonna last, outlast your flow state, you've got, you're resetting your nervous system, and you're training the brain in the flow. So, we teach people to sort of try to double down. If you can, four hours a week devoted to your primary flow activity, spread out sort of however you want, seems, three to four hours seems to sort of be enough to start moving the needle, and...

• 1:19:03Speaker 00

  The interesting thing is, anything that moves the needle a little bit that starts to be really absorptive, once you know what flow's triggers are, you just start layering those triggers in, and you can deepen and lengthen the flow state. So, Art Impossible breaks down the flow triggers, or, you know, stevenkotler.com, or flowresearchcollective.com, there's a whole bunch of free stuff, you don't even have to, you know, buy the book, there's a bunch of free stuff that'll kind of break those things down for you, and how to use them. And, you know, primary flow activity, and then start practicing sort of with the flow triggers inside of the thing that, you know, is already, and then start transferring it to other parts of your life. That's where I start.

• 1:19:46Speaker 00

  And I, you know, if you don't have four hours a week for primary flow activity, or 90 minutes a day for uninterrupted concentration, start by starting. 10 minutes and 5 minutes, right? Like, don't, it doesn't, it is not, just because you don't have that amount of time now, the good news about flow, massive heightener of productivity. You get way more done, so you're going to end up getting time back, right? We always say, in peak performance, there are places, in peak performance, you have to go slow to go fast. This is one of those places.

• 1:20:17Chris Williamson?

  Dude, awesome. Today's been so, so good. The Art of Impossible, a Peak Performance Primer, will be linked in the show notes below on Amazon, along with everything that you've gone through today, and whatever else I can find. If people want, is it the Passion Recipe?

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, that's where, yeah, by the way, if you are interested in more passion, go to thepassionrecipe.com. It's a curiosity is designed to be built into passion, passion is designed to be built into purpose. None of them are supposed to be super mystical. It's actually a fairly easy thing to do, so if you don't know what you're passionate about... You do know what you might be curious about. By curious, I mean like you'd like to go read a book or two and attend a lecture or watch a movie or a documentary. I mean, I don't mean you're burning curiosity. I mean, you're just like, I'd like to learn about this thing. If you can find a single thing that is at the intersection of three or four or five of your curiosities and you start to work there and learn there, that's the seed kernel of passion.

• 1:21:16Speaker 00

  And if you want to learn how to do this more formally, passionrecipe.com, like flowblocker.com. That's, uh, we built, that was another one where like, I just got sick of talking about it. So I was like, no, let's just build it so I can send people there because I'm sick of talking about it.

• 1:21:30Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Steven, dude, thank you so much for today.

• 1:21:34Speaker 00

  Yes, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

• 1:21:52Speaker 03

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• 1:22:03Speaker 04

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• 1:22:09Speaker 02

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• 1:22:13Speaker 04

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• 1:22:16Speaker 02

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• 1:22:18Speaker 04

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