53 Becoming Superhuman: Unlocking the Science of Ultimate Human Performance with Steven Kotler

As an athlete, being "in the zone" is a state that I absolutely love. It's something that doesn't happen as often as I like, but when I get there, it's the best feeling on earth. I've always been passionate about getting to that place and this week on the School of Greatness I've got an amazing guest with an intimate knowledge of what it means to be "in the zone." Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 53 on the science of ultimate human performance with Stephen Kotler.

• 0:09Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:35Lewis Howes?

  What is upgrades? Thanks so much for tuning in today to this very special episode all about flow. And there's a great quote by Bruce Lee that explains flow when he talks about becoming like water.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  I said, empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend, like that, you see? I see, I get the idea.

• 1:18Lewis Howes?

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

• 1:58Lewis Howes?

  Every practice, every game, it's all about how to get into that flow in the zone. Some people call it, other people call it runner's high or in the pocket. You know, it's every athlete's dream is tapping into this. Flow state. So I'm very excited to introduce you to Stephen. And what we're going to be covering is really decoding the science of ultimate human performance and strategies for getting into the zone and being in flow on a more frequent, consistent basis. We're also going to talk about kind of Stephen's story about how he got into this subject and, and becoming so obsessed with learning about this in the first place. And understanding the exponential growth of human performance over the last 50 years. It's pretty staggering what humans

• 2:42Lewis Howes?

  have been able to create, especially in extreme sports. So I'm very excited about this. Make sure to get a piece of paper and a pen and take some notes on this because Stephen covers a lot. We've also got all the show notes back over at LewisHowes.com forward slash flow. So make sure to check that out as well. And let's go ahead and dive into the rise of Superman with Stephen Kotler.

• 3:17Lewis Howes?

  Thanks again, everyone for tuning into the School of Greatness. I am so excited for today's episode. I've got a new friend on. His name is Stephen Kotler. How's it going, man?

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Really, really good, Lewis. Great to be with you.

• 3:29Lewis Howes?

  And you wrote a book that is the book I've been waiting for my entire life. No joke. It's called The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance. And as a, you know, a white kid growing up in Ohio, middle Ohio, similar to you in northern Ohio, I always wanted to figure out what was the advantage that I could get as an athlete to raise my game to the next level and perform as a peak performer in every sport that I was doing in middle school, high school, college, and eventually the goal was to be a professional athlete. And I was looking for ways to always get in the flow state or get in the zone. And I don't know if you have a different definition for both of those,

• 4:10Lewis Howes?

  or you consider them the same thing. But for me, it was always looking to how can I be in the zone and flow as often as possible. And you've written the book that basically breaks it down and talks about ultimate human performance. And now it can be applied not just for extreme athletes, but in business and life and relationships as well. And I'm super pumped to go into this. So thanks so much for writing it.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Well, thank you for having me. Let me talk about it.

• 4:35Lewis Howes?

  So, let's go into, uh, let's go into it first, so people know. Uh, what is flow? Let's just kind of go into that.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Well, you started off with, with, right where we should start, which is, the lingo is endless, right? In the zone, runner's high, if you want to go back to the beatnik jazz musicians, they called it being in the pocket. Um, the most recent term that I've heard, coming out of the comedy world, in improv comedy, they call it the forever box. Anyways, um, the term that scientists prefer is flow states. And, quite simply, flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness, where we perform our best, and we feel our best. And I think everybody's kind of tasted this experience. In flow, we are so focused on the task at hand, that everything else vanishes. Time, either speeds up, so five hours will

• 5:28Speaker 02

  pass by like five minutes, or slows down, like that freeze around effect in a car crash. Your sense of self, your sense of self-consciousness disappear completely, and all aspects of performance, mental and physical, go through the roof. So that's kind of the quick shorthand definition of what we're talking about in flow.

• 5:46Lewis Howes?

  And why, why are you so obsessed with it? And why'd you write this book about it?

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Well, the, it comes out of two different, uh, places. The, the, the origin story, my origin story with flow, when I was thirty years old, I had Lyme disease. And I was very, very sick. And for those who, people listening who don't know what Lyme is, it's like the worst flu you've ever had, crossed with paranoid schizophrenia.

• 6:08Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  I lost all my functionality. I was, chronic pain, I could barely walk, my mental function was gone, my short-term memory was gone, my long-term memory was gone, I couldn't spell, I couldn't write, I couldn't work. I was literally lucid, and able to like, even hold a conversation, for less than an hour a day. And I had been sick for a very long time. The doctors had pulled me off meds, they didn't know what else to do with me, uh, and nobody knew if I was ever gonna get any better. And I was, I'll be honest, I was totally suicidal. Because, I, all I was gonna be from that point on, was a burden to my loved ones. No, there was, there wasn't anything I could do. So, I was very, very suicidal. And I, you know, it really was a question of, um, when, and no longer if. And a friend of mine showed up at my front door, I was living in LA. She demanded that we go surfing.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  And I just started laughing. I was like, I can't walk across the room. You're out of your frickin' mind. We're gonna go surfing. And she was a pain in my butt. I wouldn't leave, wouldn't leave, wouldn't leave. And after like, a couple hours of this, I was like, you know what? What the hell? I can always kill myself tomorrow. What, what's the worst that could happen?

• 7:09Speaker 03

  (laughing)

• 7:10Speaker 02

  So like, they literally like, they walked me to the car. I had to be helped into the car. They drove me to Sunset Beach with You Know Anything About Surfing in Los Angeles. It is the wimpiest beginner break in the world. And it was summer, so the waves were small, the tide was low. There was nobody out, the waves were maybe two to three feet tall. They gave me a board the size of a Cadillac and they walked me out to the break. Literally had to walk me out to the break. Put me on the board. A couple seconds later, a wave came. And I don't know what happened. Muscle memory took over, whatever. Spun my board around, jumped up, and I jumped up into a different dimension. Suddenly, you know, my senses were incredibly heightened and time seemed to be slowed and down. All these, it was a quasi mystical experience, you could say.

• 7:54Speaker 02

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

• 8:37Speaker 02

  And Lyme is only fatal if it gets into your brain. And I thought it was moving into my brain. I thought that could be the only explanation. And that I was actually, even though I was feeling better, I was pretty certain I was dying. So what started this was a giant quest to figure out what the heck was going on with me. And... You know, that quest got solved. The short version of what happened, just so your readers or your listeners understand, is one of the things with flow is there's a very complicated neurochemical reaction that produces flow. Five very potent neurochemicals are released during the state. All of them are significant immune system boosters, which is important. More importantly, flow seems to reset the nervous system. Autoimmune conditions are

• 9:19Speaker 02

  basically a nervous system going crazy, right? So, these continual flow states calm my nervous system way back down. That was where the health boost came from. It led into all the other stuff we're going to talk about, performance and things like that. The second thing that happened is, my background is as a journalist, and I started writing in the early 90s, and back then, action sports were the new thing, and if you could ski, surf, rock, do any of those things, there was work. And I was hungry, and I was young, and I wanted work, and I spent the better portion of five or six years chasing pro athletes around the world, mostly skiers around mountains, and I kept seeing, over and over, really, I mean, things that shouldn't be possible, like impossible, impossible. And I was a great skier when I

• 10:02Speaker 02

  started this, and then I saw what these guys were doing, and I wasn't even a beginner again. It was like, I couldn't believe what was going on, and I kept thinking to myself and talking to other journalists in the field, saying, "Well, this has got to end. There's no possible way this progression can continue." But the idea at the heart of Rise of Superman, which is the book that I have coming out, right, that we're talking about, is simply this. If you look at action adventure sports as a data set over the past 25 years, what you see is nearly exponential growth in ultimate human performance. So, I define ultimate human performance as performance when life or limb is on the line, and nothing like this has ever happened before. In the history of the world, sports performance, it's slow, it's steady, it's governed by the laws of evolution. You plot it on a graph, you get a linear

• 10:47Speaker 02

  curve. At no point do you get athletic performance quintupling in a decade. But let's take surfing. Here's a thousand-year-old sport. From 400 AD to 1996, the biggest wave anybody's ever surfed is 25 feet. And today, it's pushing over 100 feet. Oh, my gosh. So, and that's one example. If you go back to the early 90s, snowboarding, the biggest cliff anybody had ever jumped over was the Baker Road Gap in Mount Baker. It's 40 feet end to end. I was just talking to Travis Rice a couple of weeks ago, a pro snowboarder, and he told me, you know, he had just cleared something he thought was about 230 feet. Wow.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  This is what we're talking about. You're looking at literally nearly exponential, sometimes exponential growth in ultimate human performance. So the question of the heart of rise is, what the hell's going on? And the answer is, for a variety of reasons that I'm sure we're going to get to, these athletes are getting into flow more frequently than anybody else in the history of the world. So I start out with... How do I do that? Well, give me a, let me give you a quick historical perspective. The research on flow is vast. It starts in the 1870s, um, and goes all the way up till now. And as far back in the 1870s, we started to notice, uh, you know, that there was optimal states of consciousness and there was these weird altered states. By the 1970s, when Mahaly

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Chiksemyai came along, he not only identified seven conditions that are the way we identify flow. So if, if any of these seven things start showing up, you know you're in flow. So at the low end, that's intense concentration, focus on the task at hand, merger of action and awareness. The high end, it's time dilation, the vanishing of, of ego and things like that. And there's states of micro flow where you only get a couple of these things and macro flow where you get the full bore experience. So it's, one way to think of it is like any other emotion. Emotions exist on a spectrum. You can be a little bit irate, or you can be homicidally pissed off. Same thing with flow, right? Chiksemyai also identified three psychological triggers, and these have been exceptionally well validated, one of the

• 12:53Speaker 02

  most well validated theories in psychology. They essentially underpin extra performance theory. That was in the seventies, sixties and seventies that he first identified those. In the eighties and the nineties, a guy named Keith Sawyer, who was at the University of Washington, St. Louis, brilliant kind of neuropsychologist, discovered, now there's a group flow state, a shared flow experience, when a whole bunch of people get into a flow state together. So you play football, anytime you see a fourth quarter comeback, right? Right. It's everybody dropping into flow at the same time. When football looks like ballet, the pretty good, you know, it's a pretty good, good tip that there, everybody's in group flow. So he discovered there are 10 social triggers that bring on group flow. The work at the Flow Genome Project, which is the research organization that I co-founded,

• 13:38Speaker 02

  where we study flow, we've identified three environmental triggers and one creative trigger. And the reason action and adventure sports athletes get into flow so frequently, it's twofold. One is necessity is clearly the mother of invention, meaning... The level of performance has gone up so much that if these athletes are not in flow when they're performing, they're gonna end up in the hospital or dead. So it's become a necessity in action adventure sports. The other thing that has happened is, and this happened inadvertently, it was not intentional, nobody set out to do this, but what they ended up doing in the past twenty years in action sports, there were a number of changes and things along those lines that I won't go into, but they basically surrounded themselves with all fifteen of these flow triggers. Wow.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  They basically created the most high-flow environment they possibly could, could. So everything in their lives are triggering flow. So the rea- I mean, it's, so it's a twofold. They had to do this out of necessity and possibly, you know, I, I don't think it was conscious, but at an unconscious level, flow is, you know, we, psychologists talk about it as a source code of intrinsic motivation, meaning like, when you're in flow, another way of putting this is the five neurochemicals you get during flow are the most addictive chemicals on earth. Mm-hmm. And the only time you ever get access to all five of them at once is in flow. You couldn't, for example, dopamine shows up in flow. Now, cocaine is widely known to be the most addictive drug on earth. All that happens when you snort cocaine is it releases dopamine into your brain and it blocks its free uptake. Right?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Mm. So flow gives you four other chemicals besides dopamine that are also just as potent, and it cocktails them. If you were to try to cocktail the street drug version of these things, you'd end up dead or in a coma. Wow. Would not work. But the brain cocktails them naturally. And the interesting thing about flow as opposed to all other addictions is, all other addictions lead backwards. But flow, because, and you can, you can testify to this, because we were talking about it earlier, not only is your performance, does it go through the roof when you're in flow, so not only do you get turned into Superman, you usually get a vision of what your life could be like if you were, had more access to flow, or if you were to follow this path forward. So it leads you into the future. Flow is the only addiction I know of that drives you forward instead of backwards.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Mm. So, they talk about it as a source code of intrinsic motivation, deeply, deeply, deeply motivating, and so you got an incredibly motivating, you know, state, and, you know, that all these athletes are driving towards. And you, and you see this, by the way, look at surfers, these are people not known for being hyper-responsible in life, right? Yet, if it's firing overhead tubes, they're out there at four o'clock in the morning for dawn patrol, every day. Right. Right? So we, we've all seen this over and over, you see it with artists. Um, who are, you know, musicians, totally completely unreliable people in general, except when it comes time to make music and then they're totally there and totally flying.

• 16:33Lewis Howes?

  That's true. I mean, I can attest to this. I mean, there was one specific game. I've been in flow many times, but there was one specific game where I remember it the most in college. And I just felt invincible. I felt unstoppable. I remember the first part of the game, the first quarter, there was one defensive back on me. I played wide receiver and then there was two on me and then there was three on me with the safety shading over and I just felt like the whole team was on me and it didn't matter how many people were on me, what they did, what they tried to do. The ball was still coming my way and I caught everything. And I remember at the end of the game, feeling like I didn't catch that many balls or get that many yards. You know, it's kind of like I had no clue what my stats were, what I had

• 17:18Lewis Howes?

  done. And then, and everyone was like, man, you had this unbelievable game. How many catches do you think you got? And I was like, I don't know, maybe like eight or 10. And which was about, you know, probably a good game for me like.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  That's a good game.

• 17:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it was like eight or 10. And then we had lost, we actually lost the game by three points. And it was, so I was more like depressed than anything because we lost. So I'm the last one to get out of the shower because I'm like, you know, I'm beating myself up thinking, what could I have done better? How could I have been a better teammate? And then I'm the last one to get out of the shower, you know, just kind of like wallowing in my own misery of this loss. And my coach comes up to me and says, uh, you know, just want to say good game. You actually broke a world record for the most receiving yards in a single football game. And I was like, what? I was like, are you sure? And I was like, how many? He said, uh, 418 yards.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  No way.

• 18:03Lewis Howes?

  And I was like, I just didn't believe it because I was like.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Well, I mean.

• 18:09Lewis Howes?

  I was like, did they mess the stats up?

• 18:11Speaker 02

  You know, and we talked about it, you know, earlier, McKinsey, right? Did a 10 year study of top executives in flow. They found top executives in flow are five times more productive than out of flow. And that's. Five times, right, it's 500% more productive, right? So you're that what you're looking at is in as a perfect example of that. I mean, the the general feeling, and this is not 100% true, so I don't want to, you know, I don't want to steer people wrong here, but the general feeling is pretty much every world championship in gold medal has a flow state behind it. It's not mandatory. You can have peak performance without flow, but it doesn't feel very good. It's really, really hard and it's not sustainable.

• 18:54Lewis Howes?

  It doesn't feel easy and natural.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  At all, at all.

• 18:58Lewis Howes?

  And the only way you won is because everyone else around you wasn't in flow either.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely. One other thing I just want to interject because we didn't, I didn't say it earlier and I and I and I should. The reason we call it flow, the reason flow gets its name is when when Chick sent me high, Mahaly Chick sent me high was the chairman of the University of Chicago back in the 60s and 70s. He performed what we would now call it the largest global happiness study ever. We didn't have happiness studies back then, so and he really wasn't actually even looking at happiness. He was looking at what we would now call life satisfaction or well being. Um, but he just, it was a giant survey, almost 10,000 people, and he discovered a number of things. First of all, he discovered that flow is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. His survey looked at experts, right?

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Top dancers, top rock climbers, top neurosurgeons, top Wall Street traders, et cetera, et cetera. But he also looked at Navajo sheep herders and Detroit assembly line workers and Japanese teenage motorcycle gang riders. And all of them said when they felt their best and they performed their best, they were in the state called flow. And it was called flow because in flow, every decision, every action leads seamlessly, fluidly to the next. So the truth of the matter is flow feels flowy. And that's where the name comes from.

• 20:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it feels very, very natural and in the zone. I mean, that's the way I used to exploit it all the time in the zone. Um, so it occurs, it occurs everywhere is what you're just kind of talking about. Pretty much any type of workplace, athletics, you know, sheep herding, you said it's it's all over the place, all the time, right?

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, provided, provided certain initial conditions are met, meaning these 15 triggers we talked about a second ago, provided, you know, your, your, those initial conditions are present, yeah, absolutely, anybody can get into flow, all ages. And the funny thing is, by the way, most people don't even realize this. Studies of people in flow at work, most people spend about five percent of their work life in flow, which is, you know, ideally not much, but interestingly, by the way, if you want to talk about production, the McKinsey researchers who did this ten year study on flow, they calculated if you could move that five percent up to fifteen to twenty percent of your time in flow, overall workplace productivity would double.

• 21:07Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Which is, to me, you know, kind of the most astounding thing in the world in this, you know, everywhere you you look right now in business, people are talking about the culture of speed and business is moving so much faster and how do you keep up and how do you keep up and how do you keep up? Well, here's your answer. We already know.

• 21:23Lewis Howes?

  So is there is there such a thing as too much flow?

• 21:26Speaker 02

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

• 22:09Speaker 02

  overloading the brain with that with information. So if you are an athlete, this is skill acquisition. You are trying to learn a new route as a wide receiver.

• 22:17Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  And, right, it's uncomfortable, you're awkward, it's not good, and you get frustrated, frustrated, frustrated, and be almost to the point that of of total boiling over.

• 22:26Lewis Howes?

  And one of the quicks.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Right. If if I'm a writer, right, this is, not only am I doing all my research, but I'm, you know, doing the bang my head against the wall, hard work of trying to get the structure and the first paragraph written. And, you know, If you would have talked to me yesterday, I was as far from flow as I possibly could get working on a new article. And, you know, literally, I was, it's a major article and very important for me, and I was ready to quit. I literally, I was about to call my agent, I was like, I don't want to do this. And, you know, this morning, I had a breakthrough, and there you go. But, so, for the first stage, struggle, very unflowy. Second stage is relaxation. You literally have to take your mind off the problem, you have to relax, and that triggers a, there's a neurobiological release that happens when that happens, but essentially,

• 23:12Speaker 02

  during struggle, all the stress hormones rise, right? Cortisol, norepinephrine, you're very uncomfortable. When you relax, you get a global release of nitric oxide that flushes all those negative chemicals out of your system, and instead, you get dopamine, and endorphins, anamamine, and all the positive uplifting chemicals that come in flow. So, release, struggle goes into release, gives way to flow, and then, on the back end, there is a memory learning and consolidation phase. This is also important, this is where most people just screw up. They get into a flow state, they feel like Superman, can do incredible things, and then suddenly, it goes away. Goes away because the neurochemicals have a very short lifespan in your brain, right?

• 23:54Speaker 02

  And then the brain has to, needs more nutrition, needs to do certain things to build those back up again. So, for people who have done illicit pharmaceuticals, say ecstasy, they flush all the serotonin out of their system, and they're very depressed the next day, because the brain has to make it again. You can't, you can't do a lot of drugs days in a row because of this. Same thing with flow. So, first I'll talk about flow hacking, then I'll answer your question. Where people screw up very often is, they get into flow, they feel like Superman, and they come out of flow into this memory learning consolidation phase, where what is really going on is the brain is moving all the stuff you learned in flow into long-term storage, but you have none of these neurochemicals.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  So, you're very, very down, and you're depressed. Most people... Cannot relax into it and just chill out and, and accept the fact that, I, I call it the hangover rule. Most people, most adults have been hungover. They know that you should not trust your brain when you're hungover. You're gonna get all kinds of wild negative thoughts and you've just gotta kinda say, okay, I'll deal with this tomorrow when I feel better. I'm not gonna deal with this today. This is my hangover brain talking, right? We know how to do this. We do this kind of automatically. Same thing happens in flow. You have to kind of relax because you have to go from this like learning consolidation phase back into struggle. Very difficult to do if you're gripped about not being in flow anymore. You could end up stuck there for a very, very long time. So to answer your question, there is no possible

• 25:23Speaker 02

  way to live in flow, in what you call in flow, in the actual zone, because you have to go through this four-stage cycle and two of the stages feel profoundly unflowy.

• 25:34Lewis Howes?

  What, what was the fourth phase?

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Pardon me?

• 25:38Lewis Howes?

  What was the fourth phase?

• 25:40Speaker 02

  The fourth phase is a memory, a learning consolidation phase. Um, and, and one thing I wanna, one thing I wanna speak to that, it's not, so when we talk about how could performance possibly be five, how could you be five times more productive? What the hell is going on? Well, one of the things that is going on is you're learning at a massively accelerated rate. So a quick shorthand for ner- learning and memory is the more neurochemicals you get during an experience, the greater chance that experience is gonna move from short-term holding into long-term storage. Because flow is this giant dump of neurochemicals, all those neurochemicals really are, are tags for memory for the brain to go, oh, this stuff is really important. I better save it for later. So we've got studies run everywhere

• 26:23Speaker 02

  from brick and mortar schools to electronic learning environments that show learning is massively accelerated flow. To give you a number, DARPA did a study with snipers, uh, and they, you, they induced flow artificially, uh, I won't even go into it because we'd have to talk a lot more about the neurobiology of flow, but they induced it artificially using transcranial direct stimulation and

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Taught snipers target acquisition skills. They learn them 230% faster. In a separate study, non-military, also induced flow artificially, they cut the time it took to train a novice sniper up to an expert level by 50%. So massive boost in learning and memory is one of the things that drive that performance up in flow. But you need, by the way, learning is hampered by anxiety. So what happens is when people get out of flow and they get gripped because you're not Superman anymore. And it's really like without these feel-good neuro- neurochemicals, it's not even like you go back to normal. You are suboptimal. You are, you are, you are not feeling very happy. You're in hangover mode.

• 27:27Speaker 02

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

• 27:46Lewis Howes?

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

• 28:23Speaker 02

  The bad answer for you is there is, there's no answer there. There's no, everybody wants the quick fix. They want the magic pill. They want all that. And I, and I always tell people, two things are very fundamentally different about flow. It were three things. One, it's, you know, it's a step function. It's not, you're not trying to be 5% better. You're five times better to step function worth of difference, right? So that's different. The second thing is there is no magic pill. There is no, I mean, I can, we can, and I'm happy to do it. We can walk through the 15 flow triggers. All you can do is live in such a way that you're kind of, your life is, is filled with these, with these flow triggers. That works really, really well. And also, by the way, get plenty of sleep, be relaxed.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Things like that are very, very, very critical in flow. The other thing that you need to know is this is not. Self-help, first of all, because it, you know, there's nothing I can tell you today that you can apply tomorrow that is going to make your life better. I can, what I tell people is you gotta kinda throw out a lot of stuff and sort of start over and build your life around these flow triggers. The other thing you need to know, and I say this out loud and very kinda forthright about it, these are incredibly addictive, potent neurochemicals. Yes. And you, the flow is dangerous. It is, I mean, you see this in action in venture sport athletes. Couple of years ago, we lost one professional athlete, I think it was every eighteen days. Um, it was, I mean, it's insane.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  People chase the state at all costs. It's very, very addictive, and if you don't know what you're doing, and if you can, for example, if you don't understand the four stages of the flow cycle, you can get gripped and you can find yourself out of flow for months at a time. And those months are miserable and depressing. It is not, you know, this can go wrong. You have to, you have to tread lightly, be very aware, it requires a lot of emotional control. This is, this is big boy stuff. This is not, you know, this, I mean, you wanna know how to be Superman? We can tell you how to be Superman, but it is not easy and it is not, you know, the safest path for you. Right. And I, you know, and I'm really, I really try to be clear on that because maybe it's

• 30:33Speaker 02

  not for everybody, um, and that, that may just be the case. You, you, you have, you have to really wanna play at this level, cause you, you are definitely playing with fire. And it's, I always say, as children, we are taught not to play with fire, not how to play with fire. And if you want, if, if you can have massive acceleration in performance like you've never believed, never believed, but it is, it is a dangerous path and there is no quick way in. Yeah. That said, let's talk about the flow triggers. So let's talk about what people can actually do to get more flow in their lives.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  And I'm not, I'm not going to go into too much depth because they're all in Rise of Superman, but let's talk about, let's just talk about the three trigger, the three environmental triggers that action and adventure sport athletes pull the most frequently. Now, other people do them otherwise, but, you know, very common in action adventure sports. So, they are high consequence, deep embodiment, and rich environment, and let me go through them one at a time. High consequence is obvious. Flow follows focus, right? You need incredibly, incredibly tight focus. High consequence is risk. Catches your attention and it holds it, right? Now, the important thing to remember here is that it is not just physical risk.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Emotional risk, creative risk, mental risk, all these things work as well. For a shy guy, all you gotta do is cross the room and talk to the pretty girl to trigger it. And the reason, and by the way, let's break it down even further. The risk triggers, whenever we take a risk, mental or physical, the brain releases dopamine. It releases dopamine for a lot of reasons, but dopamine speeds up muscle reaction times, it heightens pattern recognition, it tightens focus, it does all the things that you need to do to pay more attention when you're in a high consequence environment. That's what you're going for. You don't have to have the physical risk. The thing that helps action and adventure sport athletes is they don't just take one risk. They take lots of risks right in a row.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  So, for example, the business environment we see the most flow in is startups, entrepreneurship. Why? Lots and lots and lots of risk. So, that's the high consequence trigger. Let's talk about a rich environment. A rich environment means lots of novelty, lots of unpredictability, lots of complexity. Basically, what you are going to do is you are putting yourself in an environment where you're overwhelming the brain and your conscious processing has to be swapped out for your subconscious processing. So, most people have this experience. Have you ever felt awe? Right, where you see a beautiful sunset and the world seems to freeze for a second. You're just kinda sucked into that sunset. That's actually the front end of a flow state.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  It's a dopamine release. It's the feeling of time dilation. Time starts to slow down. But it's really the brain reacting to lots of novelty, lots of complexity, lots of unpredictability. Wide action adventure sports trigger flow so much. Lots of novelty, lots of unpredictability, lots of complexity in the environment. It's built in. But you can get novelty, complexity, unpredictability in your daily life in lots of different ways, right? I mean, novelty, read a book outside your field. Read a book that you wouldn't normally read. That can be enough. Let's jump to the last one, which is deep embodiment. Deep embodiment is a really fancy way of saying all of your senses are firing all at once.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  So you're basically paying attention to all your sensory streams at the same time. And not just your five senses, you're also playing, you've got vestibular awareness, which is essentially balance. You've got proprioception, which is body position in space. So all action adventure sports trigger have multiple Gs, zero Gs, and polyaxial rotation, which is rotation around one's middle. They're everywhere in those sports. These are deep embodiment triggers. They tell your body to pay attention to lots of different information streams. Most of us, most of the time, depend on mostly our eyes and a little bit on our sense of touch and a little bit on our sense of hearing. That's most of your waking day.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  You're not paying attention to everything at once because you're not putting yourself into those conditions. But you can train up deep embodiment very, very, very easily. For example, and this is, so I'm, let's be clear on what I'm talking about in this next second. I am not saying do this and you're going to get more flow. Do this and you're going to start training up deep embodiment and that will precipitate more flow. But easy ways to train up deep embodiment, for example, Zen walking meditation or yoga. Yoga where you're paying attention to your breathing and you're in your body and you're everywhere at once, right? That is a very great way to do it. One of, there's other simple ways. Eat your dinner with your fork in a different hand than you normally do. Drive to work in a different direction.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  These force you to pay attention in ways that you don't normally pay attention. And do that over enough. Remember, every time you're doing stuff differently, you're grooving new pathways in the brain. So the more flow you have, the more flow you have. The same thing with all these flow triggers. Because the more practice you put into developing them, the easier when crunch time comes, you will have getting into flow. So to answer your question, how can you, if you've got the big presentation, you've got the whatever, how do you get into flow? I can't give you a quick fix. But what I can tell you is if you start actively building your life around these 15 flow triggers and start accessing them more often, you're going to start to groove the brain, learn the patterns your brain needs to get in the flow, and you're going to slip into flow much more easily.

• 36:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, and you've got all 15 are in the book.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, all 15 are in the book.

• 36:15Lewis Howes?

  When people pick it up, you'll be able to get access to all that. And I can definitely testify to how addictive being in the flow state is just by, you know, you always want to, for me as an athlete, I always wanted to pursue the next greatest level. And when I got injured playing football, I was depressed for about a year and a half almost, sleeping on my sister's couch recovering from a surgery. And I just missed the feeling of what it felt like to be active and be in flow and be in a high-performance game with a crowd and with the stakes on the line. And you see it, you mentioned it, a lot of pro athletes die because of this. But also, I feel like a lot of pro athletes have a lot of problems after they retire.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Afterwards.

• 36:59Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:00Lewis Howes?

  And Juju Seau is a great example.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:04Lewis Howes?

  Who's an all-pro.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Let me actually speak to that for a second. So flow has a creative trigger. It probably actually has more than one. The research is very early days on this. And when I say flow has a creative trigger, what I really mean is creativity is essentially two things. It's pattern recognition. When creativity is recombinatory, you're taking an old idea, bumping it into a new thought or a new information and creating something totally new. So that requires pattern recognition, which actually releases dopamine and creativity requires risk, which also releases dopamine. So creativity is a phenomenal flow trigger. You have this problem a lot, we see with a lot in action adventure sport athletes. And I talk to a lot of older action adventure sport athletes about, you know, why does my

• 37:49Speaker 02

  life feel so unfulfilling now? How do I get more of this? The ones who are the most successful are the ones who go into creative fields afterwards or have creative hobbies. Playing music, writing, making film, any of these, right? Anything where you're being creative, it's triggering a lot of flow. So if you're coming out of that kind of career, that kind of high-flow environment all the time, it is extremely helpful to start doing creative things. Really, really helpful. We'll absolutely cushion the blow and we'll start, you know, you'll start getting the same flow state experiences you got before.

• 38:26Lewis Howes?

  Right, so it's really channeling the energy that you lost from the activity into another creative act-

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Into another, into another activity that, that is, that creates, that's high-flow.

• 38:35Lewis Howes?

  Right, exactly.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  You know, you can move into computer coding, by the way. Coding is incredibly, flow is incredibly important in computer coding, so much so that like, you go look at the Oracle Developer's Handbook, they have a chapter on flow. There's a, there's a PeopleSoft, which is kind of a classic in, a classic kind of human capital management for software development. They, the authors of that book have argued that they should pay people for flow time, which is the time employees, the time spent in flow rather than just hours on the clock, because hours on the clock doesn't mean anything but time and flow. Really counterpr- by the way, I have no idea how you're gonna do that.

• 39:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, how are you gonna try that?

• 39:17Speaker 02

  It's a great idea, I love it, I'm for it, it's phenomenal, but I don't know, I don't know how you're gonna do it. But I will give you another, James Slavitt, who's a, he's a venture capitalist with Greylock Partners, he wrote an article for Forbes where he talked about, because creativity is massively enhanced in flow for reasons, but I can explain it if you care, but he says that flow is the most important, what he calls flow state percentage, which is again, the amount of time employees spend in flow, it's the most important management metric for building great innovation teams. So it, it, you see it a lot, like, you could, you know, you could very easily come out of your football career and become a, you know, a hacker and probably be just as deeply satisfied.

• 39:59Lewis Howes?

  Sure, yeah.

• 40:01Lewis Howes?

  Well, you and you also talked about you. You mentioned it early, kind of your story about how you got into this whole research and wanting to learn more about it is it's really a healing thing as well. It's a healing modality. Like you said, once you got up on the surfboard and you're kind of in the flow state and you're just happier, you started to recover. And it was healing. And you also mentioned something about your wife before we got into this interview about being altruistic, right?

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so um, let me, let me, let me, let me address both of those at the same time. So, uh, my wife and I run an animal sanctuary, a dog sanctuary called Rancho de Chihuahua. We deal with, uh, small dogs with very, very big problems. So special needs care, hospice care for the ages, aged. We have a healing methodology based around flow. We try to put the dogs in the flow states. Um, and it works incredibly well. And I can't like, I hate to say, I'm always nervous saying things like this out loud, but I'm just gonna say it anyways. All of our dogs come to us from a vet. Most of our dogs arrive with a warning like, yeah, this guy's gonna be alive for a month, maybe two months. It's just, you know, last legs, whatever. Um, our dogs live forever. I'm looking at a dog

• 41:08Speaker 02

  right now that has four stage cancer when he came to us, tumors all over. You know, we got, we got the tumors removed. He should have been dead six months ago, easy. I did five miles with him through the mountains this morning.

• 41:22Lewis Howes?

  What?

• 41:23Speaker 02

  Up, up and down. Um, if you get online and you search under five dog workout, the five dog workout, you'll find a Vimeo movie outside television sent a crew out here, uh, to just basically record what we do with the dogs. Um, and so you can see what it looks like. Like we're running up and down these cliff faces in these mountains. And I try to put them, I try to basically use the environmental triggers. I do it both for the healing purposes and because with it, when you have a dog sanctuary, if you can't get a dog to bond to a pack, you're screwed. If I have a dog who comes in, we don't cage our animals and there's a lot of them. So if you've got, you know, 25 animals and one of the dogs isn't bonded to the pack, he's gonna wither away and be dead very, very

• 42:04Speaker 02

  quickly. Um, so one of the other things that happens in flow, this is why earlier I said building great innovation teams, right? We talked about flow as per building innovation teams. All of the neurochemicals you get in flow are incredibly potent social bonding chemicals. Senor, epinephrine and dopamine underpin romantic love. Endorphins and anedrine are both social bonding chemicals. So you get, they're ve- I do this with the dogs because I need to get the dog, I need all the dogs to bond together and be a very tight cohesive pack. But to get to your second point, which is, there are lots of different onramps in the flow, obviously, right? Some people get into adrenaline sports, some people get into creativity, you can also get into altruism, helping others.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Alan Luchs, who founded Big Brothers Big Sisters, discovered, uh, in this in the nineties, and the altruism-based flow state is known as helper's high. And it's an unusual flow state. Most flow states only last a couple of hours. Helper's high for reasons that nobody can understand yet, but I'm dying to do the research on it, and I don't know if I'll come up with anything. But helper's high can last for days. So people can get into these low-grade flow states that last for a very long time. Interestingly, we do know, in the beginning, when Alan Luchs did his original research, we thought it was only kind of hands-on frontline altruism, like the stuff we're doing with our dogs, or working in a soup kitchen, or, you know, going, joining the Peace Corps. Turns out, you can get low-grade flow states by doing something as simple as bidding at a charity auction online.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Wow. So I think, one of the reasons, and I can't prove this to you, but if you look at like, micro lending sites like Kiva, where I can, you know, lend somebody a hundred dollars and suddenly somebody can go to college in Africa, that kind of thing, that is producing low-grade flow states. Hmm. Um, you also, video games, by the way, also produce low-grade flow states. They are mistakenly, the video game industry is very aware of this, right? They now, flow theory has become essentially the foundational metric for explaining the lure of the joystick, why are video games so popular? Interestingly, most video games are only producing low-grade flow states. It's mostly a dopamine loop. You're getting a little bit of norepinephrine, a little bit of dopamine, a couple other

• 44:16Speaker 02

  chemicals, but you're not getting the full-blown experience yet. What's interesting about this, and I actually just wrote an article for my fourth blog about this, uh, called Legal Heroin, but we are getting better and better at this. So right now, video games are incredibly addictive, as we know, and they're only putting people in low-grade flow states. We're gonna come to a point where they're driving people into full, deep flow states, and then it's gonna be really addictive. Wow. Could be a bad thing, but really interesting is there are a lot of people, uh, who are building learning-based video games, who are really- Working on this hard because we talked about the massive application you get of learning and memory and flow. So if you can imagine a learning-based video game that puts people

• 44:59Speaker 02

  into deep flow, I'm not saying we're gonna end up with like Matrix-style downloadable learning, but we're gonna get a little closer.

• 45:07Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, this is incredible stuff. I could, uh, I could talk about this forever. Um, but I wanna go a couple more questions and, uh, before we wrap it up. And what, um, let's talk about, I think you already, you talked about it a little bit, but I wanna cover a little bit more about the dark side of flow. What is that exactly?

• 45:26Speaker 02

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

• 46:09Speaker 02

  on skis or a mountain bike, right, creates flow. And I work with the animals, creates flow. When I go skiing on Monday, my chances of getting into flow on Tuesday while writing go up significantly. So I, so one of the things, what happens with people in the dark side of flow is they have one pursuit. I am a football player. I am a rock climber. And they, you know, double down and double down and double down and keep working, keep working, keep working. And the struggle phase can drag on forever when, you know, what they really need to do is lateralize and go into something tangentially related that can kick them into a flow easier. And then they can come back to football or whatever it is that you're trying to learn, right? That's really important. There are a lot

• 46:53Speaker 02

  of ways to avoid the dark side of flow. The other problem is, um... What we call bliss junkies. Bliss junkies are people who get into flow and they go, "Oh, my God, life is supposed to be like this. I should be in a flow state all the time, so I'm not going to do anything until I get back into this state." And so you end up with like people chasing the high. Flow isn't about chasing the high. It's about understanding the whole cycle and that it's about chasing the best possible version of yourself, right? You have to kind of put yourself into the struggle. And you have to also, uh, so we talked earlier about psychological triggers. One of them is, uh, very famous from extraterrestrial performance theory. It's called the challenge skills balance.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  And balance is actually, it's a misnomer. What you really need to trigger flow psychologically, one of the things, is you need the challenge to be slightly harder than the skills you bring to bear to it. So what does that actually mean? It, it, from an emotional point, it means that flow exists in what they call the flow channel, which is on the midpoint between boredom, there's not enough stimulation, so I'm not paying attention, and fight or flight, anxiety. So between boredom and anxiety, and it's right at that midline. And this has not been extremely well validated. Chick Settley-High and a Google mathematician did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and they figured that as a general rule, there needs to be a 4% difference between challenge and skills.

• 48:20Speaker 02

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

• 48:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:53Speaker 02

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

• 49:35Speaker 02

  they get to that point and they go, oh, this is too hard. I don't want to do it. It feels too scary. But high performers zip right by it. So you have to know that there's a sweet spot. So the dark side of flow is really mitigatable by knowledge. It's not, you know, it's not a death sentence. It's not any of those things. You just need to know what you're doing with this stuff. You can't, you just can't get in and, you know, you can't take it lightly. This is not like smoking pot for the first time. It's much more like line with crack.

• 50:03Lewis Howes?

  Again, I-

• 50:05Speaker 02

  I, that is, yeah, that is a quote I gotta regret. I know.

• 50:08Lewis Howes?

  I love it. Again, I could talk about this stuff for forever, go into many examples, but in your book, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance, Stephen's got so many great examples. All the different, uh, research and science that you need to know is in this book. So I highly recommend checking this out.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  Oh, Louis, one thing let me mention, by the way, starting, we're, we're gonna do, you know, as you do these days, a giant pre-sale campaign with lots of rewards. Starting, uh, the fifteenth this month, so I'm not exactly certain when you're running this, but after the fifteenth of this month, giant pre-sale campaign, uh, you know, go to risesuperman.com and, and you'll see it. The reason I'm mentioning this, we've got lots of cool gifts, including, you know, just buying one copy, we're giving you access to some of the videos we've been making with top athletes about, uh, ultimate performance and flow. We're also giving people access to a flow diagnostic that we've developed at the Flow Genome Project, which is my research organization. This is, it's a, it's a loop. We have much more rigorous ones, but it's

• 51:13Speaker 02

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

• 51:37Lewis Howes?

  That's awesome. So it's the rise of Superman dot com. And then also your site, Steven Kotler dot com. And we'll have links all up on the show notes for everyone over at School of Greatness and LewisHowes.com. So make sure to pick up a book by, I say by 10, and give some to your friends, because this is really what it's all about. It's about getting into flow state that what that makes us the most fulfilled, the most hap- the happiest, you know, and performs the best. And that's what it's all about. It's performing at our best every single day, every single moment that we possibly can. So make sure to check this out. I'm going to finish with the final question, which I ask all my guests. And interested to hear what you have to say about this. So what is your definition of greatness?

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Well, pick something easy. Why don't you? God, I should have prepped. What is my definition of greatness? Honestly, I think my definition of greatness is, yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 02

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

• 53:17Speaker 02

  many people want to compete against, you know, their neighbors, that their peers. I want to compete against the people who would be very, very, very best in the world at this. And that's what I'm striving for. And as long as you're striving for greatness, that to me is actually the definition. It's, I don't, greatness, I don't know what that is. But I do know it's about how you choose to live your day on a, on a day to day basis. It's, it's how you approach everything.

• 53:46Lewis Howes?

  I love it.

• 53:46Speaker 02

  Does that work at all?

• 53:48Lewis Howes?

  That's perfect. That's perfect.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 53:50Lewis Howes?

  I love it. Thanks again so much for coming on again. This is some interesting stuff and I hope to be able to have more conversations with you in the future and check out the project and be involved in any way possible. So I love what you're doing. I appreciate it. I think it's amazing for everyone to check out. So everyone again, check out Rise of Superman and pick up a copy or two. And thanks again so much, Steven, for coming on.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  Lewis, this was great, great fun. Thank you for having me.

• 54:32Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Again, I could do this interview for hours and just listen to Steven and go into examples about flow, nonstop. I love this topic and it's basically one of the reasons I started the School of Greatness podcast was to really dive into this type of information about peak performance, about flow, about getting in the zone and how to tap into your own greatness. So if you guys enjoyed this, please share it over on Twitter and Facebook. Again, you can go over to the show notes at lewishouse.com/flow to check this out. And there's some great quotes over there and awesome video as well and some other cool images that you'll see over on the show notes at lewishouse.com/flow. In the meantime,

• 55:16Lewis Howes?

  guys, thanks so much for tuning in, for listening, for giving me a little bit of your time once a week to these interviews that I bring on and to the guests that I bring on here. It means a ton to me. If you enjoyed it, again, please share it over on Facebook, on Twitter, on Google+, everywhere on social media, and keep sending pictures where you're listening to the show over on Instagram. You can tag me at Lewis Howes or tag the hashtag School of Greatness. I love getting images from people all over the world and see where you guys are listening to this show. Thanks so much again, guys, and make sure to go out there and do something great.