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

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   ... put simply, peak…

   1. SKSteven Kotler0:00

      ... put simply, peak performance is a 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 a checklist, I'm making a promise to myself that I'm doing this tomorrow.

   2. CWChris Williamson0:15

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

   3. SKSteven Kotler0:25

      Yes. Um, and, and I'm not the only one. Uh, so, uh, can I define flow for your listeners first before we do this? Cool. Um, flow is, uh, flow is obviously at the heart of the work that I do, and it's, and it's what predominantly we study at the Flow Research Collective, right? The neurobiology of flow, so where does the state come from in our brain? Flow is technically defined, though this is in 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 and awareness are gonna start to merge. When that happens, sense of self, self-consciousness is gonna get quiet. It's gonna diminish. Time's gonna pass strangely. It'll slow down. You'll get a freeze frame of that occasionally. Um, 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, (clears throat) 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 in 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. 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. Uh, Salim Ismail, uh, former head of, uh, president of Singularity University, where they study exponential technology and its application to kind of global challenges, and an old friend of mine and innovation expert, used to, uh, be the head of innovation at Yahoo. He once pointed out, and I wrote about this in Rise of Superman, uh, or Stealing Fire, he said, "You know, when you think about it, when you pay money to 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. Like, 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 c-conomy. 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 1/16 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. And if you're simply going by economic numbers, and by the way, we made, you can look at the, uh, footnote in Stealing Fire. There's like a five-page footnote on how we did the calculation. It was the most conser- and 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 wanna merge with the band and 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. So we took EDM instead of the whole of the concert industry. We just took EDM, and we're still like 1/16 of the global economy. So you know I'm super conservative and probably wrong. So yes is the answer to your question, resoundingly.

   4. CWChris Williamson4:09

      I love it. Uh, 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-

   5. SKSteven Kotler4:19

      Right.

   6. CWChris Williamson4:19

      ... in front of me, right? I've seen the, the 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?

   7. SKSteven Kotler4:39

      That's a great um-

   8. CWChris Williamson4:39

      Like, why is it adaptive?

   9. SKSteven Kotler4:42

      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. R- answer one, uh, runner's high is a version of flow, right? And in runner's high, you get, uh, kind of spaced out while running, and you get a lot of pain relief. Anandamide and, uh, 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 way back when who had a little bit of pain relief while running down their prey is gonna get more prey, have more meat, healthier kids. That's an evolutionary driver over time that goes forward. So that's theory one. Um, 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.

   10. CWChris Williamson5:32

       Hm.

   11. SKSteven Kotler5:32

       It's not just humans. It's common, found, 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. Um, 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, and I was like, "Look, I think I'm getting into flow with my dogs. Is that shit even possible," right? Like, and that was my first conversation with him, um, years and years ago. Um, 'cause I was like, "This is crazy. Could this possibly be real?" He's like, "No, no, check this out." Um-So the work I did that I wrote about in A Small Furry Prayer, um, could-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 40,000 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 cleaner. They were our garbage disposals. They barked danger. They were our security alar- alarms. Um, they babysat our kids. We'd go off hunting and the wolves would be right on it. They were... Where does 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, 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 'cause it's part of the work I do with the animals. If you Google Steven Kotler, the Five Dog Workout, you can see what, the work we do with dogs, um, and how it involves a lot of running with a pack of dogs. Uh, Outside Television sent a crew to my house years ago to document it. It's funny. You'll laugh. It, it's about how gen- how do you generate flow in animals? 'Cause flow boosts the immune system and we do hospice care and special needs care. So, uh, you can boost the immune system and there's a bunch of good stuff in animals by getting them into flow. It's not hard. Dogs are so hardwired for it. Anyways, but if you go out running with dogs, you fricking trip all over each other. I mean, they're, they're 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, (laughs) it'd be a fricking mess. But in flow, one of the things that happens is massively heightened pattern recognition, right? And so what... With group dynamics, team sports, 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, so literally we act on it faster. So all that stuff gets way jacked up and when dogs and humans snap into flow together, suddenly everybody's in formation, right? 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... Now now SEALs, they move non-hierarchically. They're gonna storm a building and, and get back a kidnapped victim, per... 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 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, these are not mutually exclusive. This is a theory that I've just written and I think it's freaking brilliant, so... To get into flow, what you have to do is... 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 boom, 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, which is probably useless in Britain, but whatever. Um... You get my point and I talk really fast, so I apologize. (clears throat) Um, but, um... That, uh, when we automatize a series of movements and they... 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, uh, per- uh, a brain perspective if we, 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 on lock. You can now do it no matter what," um, saying 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, um, 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 and all this could be wrong and two weeks from now somebody will figure it out, right? So there's... I sound very erudite (laughs) but the caveat, this is evolutionary theory and nobody... The sciences can only take us so far.

   12. CWChris Williamson11:01

       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, um, the sensation of flow is almost like a mastery alert, like a little mastery indicator.

   13. SKSteven Kotler11:24

       It's... Right? That's exactly, that's exact... That's all, that's... I'm stealing that. That's perfect.

   14. CWChris Williamson11:29

       You can have that one.

   15. SKSteven Kotler11:29

       That's the easiest way to describe it.

   16. CWChris Williamson11:30

       You can have that one.

   17. SKSteven Kotler11:31

       But yeah, that's essentially... Um, that was a theory... I want to say, I want to give credit where credit is due. I think it's Peter Ulmen who came up with it, I couldn't... Or Oran Dimenzano, um, they're... One is at Ulm University in Germany, the other is at the Karolinska Institute, uh, in Sweden and they're brilliant flow researchers. Um, and, uh, I think that argument is made actually in this book, Effortless Attention, which is a book on, uh, well one of the textbooks on flow, actually.

   18. CWChris Williamson11:57

       What's the difference-

   19. SKSteven Kotler11:58

       There are seven or eight textbooks.

   20. CWChris Williamson11:59

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

   21. SKSteven Kotler12:06

       Yeah, so this is an interesting que- 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... Peak per- 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 catch-all terms. When psychologists say "motivation," they don't just mean energy for action, they mean extrinsic motivation, the stuff in the world we'll work hard to get, money, sex, fame, intrinsic motivation, passion, purpose, autonomy. They mean goals and grit. So these are catch-all 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 making is how you steer. And then flow is how, because it's optimal performance, it's 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, the skills that flow amplifies now, um, it's motivation, grit, productivity, learning, creativity, cooperation, collaboration, right? So, uh, 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 ta- and, 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 our biology. Scarcity drives evolution. Scarcity resources is the biggest 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 th- 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 did it stick around? Big picture.

   22. CWChris Williamson14:45

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

   23. SKSteven Kotler14:57

       I don't... there really isn't. The only,

2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Wow. …

   1. SKSteven Kotler15:00

      um... there really isn't. The one thing that, that I want to say here, and I don't know if this is true across the board or not, more research needs to be done, but we have found that if you're inter-... I mean, there are some basics and some stuff that like, you know, but all that's covered in Art of Impossible, and this is talked about a little bit in Art of 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 control my life, I k- 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 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, is a high energy organism that always wants to conserve energy. 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 (clears throat) , 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 going to 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 or 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 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 they are, like everything everybody's 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, um, you're kind of screwed. And so, that's, that's... you know what I mean? That's just the biology, and, um, wh- which is funny, because it's the biology that sort of s- 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.

   2. CWChris Williamson17:36

      Wow.

   3. SKSteven Kotler17:37

      I don't know what the solution is.

   4. CWChris Williamson17:38

      That is so cir-

   5. SKSteven Kotler17:39

      It's a puzzle.

   6. CWChris Williamson17:39

      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... uh, 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, 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-

   7. SKSteven Kotler18:30

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

   8. CWChris Williamson18:33

      Well, there's a lot-

   9. SKSteven Kotler18:33

      It's just nonsense. It's just-

   10. CWChris Williamson18:33

       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 at, 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, and different as well.

   11. SKSteven Kotler19:07

       So, um, at The Flow Research Collective, right, the organization w- we study the neurobiology o- of peak performance, we have a, a hardcore philosophy that we sort of live by which is personality doesn't scale, biology scales. And 'cause what you see is in coaching, it's exactly what you just said in self-help and coaching, um, you see people who figure out what works for them and then they teach it 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 performance. Like, where are you on the introversion-extroversion scale and what are your risk tolerances? These are mostly genetically coded or locked into 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 a metaphor, and neurobiology is mechanism. You want it reliable and repeatable, you want neurobiology. And 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 f- first woman to really try to apply it to sport. They wrote a book together called Flow in 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 that psychology is squishy. Like, it does... like what, when you say my partner wr- 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, why do you p- what's the lang- 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 ba- 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've, my risk tolerances are ridiculous. Um, and I run around professional action sport athletes and, you know, that's what I, that's who I research and hang out with them. 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? Do you know how I get into flow? I go ski in 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 gonna train other people? Oh, yeah. We, I mean, we train a thousand people about, uh, the Flow Research Collective, right? We tr- the C-suite of Accenture right now is being trained by us. How many of them do you think are gonna want to ski through the trees at 40 miles an hour listening to the Wu-Tang Clan? (laughs)

   12. CWChris Williamson22:31

       That would be the best.

   13. SKSteven Kotler22:32

       You get my point.

   14. CWChris Williamson22:32

       That would be the best induction.

   15. SKSteven Kotler22:34

       It would.

   16. CWChris Williamson22:34

       You know, the first, the first, uh, this, the flow-

   17. SKSteven Kotler22:36

       You feel me, dog?

   18. CWChris Williamson22:36

       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, a 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.

   19. SKSteven Kotler22:56

       Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson22:56

       Why those sections?

   21. SKSteven Kotler22:57

       Well-

   22. CWChris Williamson22:58

       And how do they fit together in that order?

   23. SKSteven Kotler22:59

       So it's not Nietzsche to 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, and that could be stamp collecting, right? I don't care. Um, huge chunks of the book, 60%, um, I would say are going to be familiar. They're gonna be s- stuff you're probably doing, right? You may not kno- 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. I didn't know about this." Right? That's everybody's experience, right? Who's, who, 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 'cause 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, of peak performance, uh, 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 the right ... Like, there's-... brilliant minds who are talking about this stuff all the time, and lots of people are interested. And so, like, this kind of crowdsourced project to figure out where there's overlap and, 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, at a lower level with 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 l- like, we're all... it's the same stuff. The only advantage I had in this particular universe, some of the, 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 these people who have written the books, and are the experts, they work with me at the Collective. So like, you know, that's, w- we're a collective of, we, you know, we try to be the col- best in the world, um, in this stuff. So that's, that's, that was the goal when I started, and we're, we're, we aim for that. Maybe we failed, but that's what we were 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 gonna be an expert on flow, well, you better know... I mean, if flow optimizes empathy and environmental awareness and motivation, then, like, I better know what the hell I'm talking about on all those subjects. And when I started research... and because I'm a neural 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 a-... you start seeing, oh, wait a minute, this is all one thing. This is all one system. And other people had started putting this together. Um, Deci and Ryan are the two big brains in motivation, kind of did some of the, a lot of the early work on intrinsic motivation. Ryan went on to write a lot of really cool stuff on intrinsic motivation and neurobiology. He went in, he went from psychology into neurobiology. He wrote a bunch of papers where you could 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, and art and whatever. I was really, I've been for a long time looking at creativity. How does this stuff apply to creativity? And that was, uh, it's a totally different field. It's a totally different world. It gave me, you know... And the learning stuff matters 'cause we train 1000 people a month, and you can't, like, you can't train that many people and be bad at it, right? (laughs) Like, they don't let you. They get mad, I've discovered.

   24. CWChris Williamson26:58

       (laughs) Yeah, I bet that they do. It's, um... I think, y- y- I know that you're a fan of David Epstein as well. He's-

   25. SKSteven Kotler27:08

       Yeah. David's great. He's brilliant.

   26. CWChris Williamson27:09

       ... past guests 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 specialize 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. Um-

   27. SKSteven Kotler27:29

       It's...

   28. CWChris Williamson27:30

       It's interesting.

   29. SKSteven Kotler27:31

       David's work, uh, yeah, David's work on range, um, in where, where he talks about range is 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 A- 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. Um, 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? B- basically, in the book of, in the beginning of Art of 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, 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, so that's the, the point he's making is, um, is generalism in search of match fit gives you the best long term results, if you're interested in walking the path to 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, 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 had to 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 talk, "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 gonna do it ourselves. We were like, "Okay, we're gonna figure all of it." Like, you... Neuroscience? Cool. Uh, l- where do I start reading? You know what I mean? Tennis? Cool. Give me a racket. Let's go.

   30. CWChris Williamson29:47

       What do you think most people have wrong about motivation?
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   (laughs) …

   1. SKSteven Kotler30:00

      um... and I, I think they're related. The first is that people really mystify, especially in, in today's culture, we mystify passion and purpose. "Ooh, it's... Purpose is 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-

   2. CWChris Williamson30:28

      (laughs)

   3. SKSteven Kotler30:28

      ... 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? I did-

   4. CWChris Williamson30:41

      Yeah.

   5. SKSteven Kotler30:42

      ... huh? Okay. Anyways, (laughs) that's, uh, it happens. (laughs) 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 mo... 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 r- after world records, um, first of all, the biology is 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 going to bring to the bowling, and you've got the bowling skills. Now, you can get more bowling skills. That's called practice. 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, brain, 25% of your energy at rest, forgetting you're not even paying attention, at rest, daydreaming mode, um, and, uh, 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 purposeful 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. 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 gonna 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 and kumbaya, but from a peak performer's perspective, I want endorphins, oxytocin and, and serotonin, which are pro-soc- social feel-good reward chemicals, and they're super motivators. So they're... Like we may... The first thing people get wrong is we make... We mystify passion and purpose, and we think it's all these things. It's not. It's a focusing, uh, it's a- 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... 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. 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 tra... I, 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. Um, but I-

   6. CWChris Williamson34:02

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

   7. SKSteven Kotler34:05

      I just y- I just, uh, you... 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, I ask this question to people all the time, um, which is, uh, "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. Stewart Brand once said, and I think he's, 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, of sort of happiness and well-being that are available to humans. The first level is moment by moment happiness. Um, how do you feel right here, right now, which is what Stewart was talking about, and he's probably right there. The next level's up enjoyment and then, um, 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 and well-being than people with the most flow in their lives, and usually that flow is coming from something that's tied to something greater than themselves.

   8. CWChris Williamson35:32

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

   9. SKSteven Kotler35:40

      And, and you, you-

   10. CWChris Williamson35:40

       ... you serve yourself.

   11. SKSteven Kotler35:42

       So here's the funny thing, and there's a, there's an inversion of that which is also true, which is equally weird. (clears throat) So flow and a bunch of other altered 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 bigger than...

   12. CWChris Williamson36:03

       (laughs)

   13. SKSteven Kotler36:03

       I mean, have you ever met more blowhards than are like existing in the psychedelic community right now? Like how many-

   14. CWChris Williamson36:10

       That's a really good point.

   15. SKSteven Kotler36:10

       ... 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.

   16. CWChris Williamson36:24

       (laughs)

   17. SKSteven Kotler36:24

       I'm for it. Let's go.

   18. CWChris Williamson36:26

       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.

   19. SKSteven Kotler36:35

       Yeah, it, it... Which, you know, we have a T-shirt. We don't have much swag at the Flow Research Collective, but we have a T-shirt that says never trust the dopamine-... because the big ego high comes with a 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 a... We tell people also, like, flow, 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... Uh, you'll have a great idea to single-handedly reinvent '70s polyester disco fashion. Ha ha ha, staying alive. Right? I mean, you're gonna come home, and you're gonna be like, "I bought what?"

   20. CWChris Williamson37:21

       (laughs)

   21. SKSteven Kotler37:21

       "I bought what?" Like, "Huh?"

   22. CWChris Williamson37:22

       You're gonna be disgusted with yourself.

   23. SKSteven Kotler37:23

       "Honey, honey, I, I, I, I maxed out the Visa. You'll never believe why." Right?

   24. CWChris Williamson37:30

       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 an imperfect environment and put you on the back foot.

   25. SKSteven Kotler37:43

       We write about this in Fire, um, but like, so couple things about flow. A lot of stuff is amplified, but you just watched as the prefrontal cortex, front of the brain are shut down. Prefrontal cortex handles logical complex decision-making, long-term planning, (clears throat) 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 technology. There's a whole bunch of people in the self-help world who put people into flow using various techniques, you know, um, and then upsell them. "Hey, you feel how good that is? Check out my new platinum level superstar turbo program." Right? Risk assessment is off. Long-term planning is shut down. That, like, there's an argument that that should be ille- illegal, right? (laughs) Like, there, 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, 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.

   26. CWChris Williamson39:21

       That's a good point.

   27. SKSteven Kotler39:22

       You know?

   28. CWChris Williamson39:23

       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?

   29. SKSteven Kotler39:32

       I love that quote. (laughs) 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. 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, is this question. 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 came... 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... Even, I mean, 1920s, he was painting heavily, maybe to hens. 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.

   30. CWChris Williamson41:30

       Perhaps. Yeah. I, um, 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 depth of his excen- eccentricity.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Yeah, you think that…

   1. SKSteven Kotler45:00

      Wow. Um, so maybe he meant something different by, "I am, I am drugs," than like ... Uh, maybe he was going much farther than-

   2. CWChris Williamson45:11

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

   3. SKSteven Kotler45:16

      Uh, uh, uh, yeah. (laughs) Uh, uh, uh, more research is needed, Steven.

   4. CWChris Williamson45:19

      Precisely.

   5. SKSteven Kotler45:20

      Steven has learned the lesson.

   6. CWChris Williamson45:20

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

   7. SKSteven Kotler45:31

      So, what's interesting, um, 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, uh, s- hit record in the, 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, but 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, simple things make a really big difference. I'll give you one kind of like bit of neurobiological information that, that is often

   8. NANarrator46:15

      Yeah.

   9. SKSteven Kotler46:15

      ... the ballgame with creativity, which is ha- 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 and repeatable." 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've given you three choices, right? That's an extreme situation, but the same thing happens with any lev- uh, level, levels of anxiety. Little bit is good. Little bit of focused attention, it'll get you curious, it'll, it'll move you along, but it'll, uh, too much and you have all kinds of problems. The issue, if we're gonna be a little more formal, is the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, um, 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 recombinant where your brain takes in novel information then it finds an older link to that new information, right? And uses the, the new thing that comes out or the two things being blended together to create something startling. That's essentially creativity, um, at a really basic level. But, (clears throat) when you're scared, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex goes, "Well, dude, I don't want to associate this thing that I, uh, you know, this bit of novelty in an 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 'cause 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, 'cause 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, uh, if you wanna train your nervous system, the best tools to reach for are either a daily gratitude practice, a daily, uh, mindfulness focused meditation practice, or 20 to 40 minutes of that daily exercise. Those are the three best ways to flush stress hormones out of your system.

   10. CWChris Williamson48:23

       Mm-hmm.

   11. SKSteven Kotler48:23

       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. Um, it'll keep your nervous system in check enough. If 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. Um, and one of the big reasons for flow, also for creativity. Um, there's a bunch of other way, o- other things like that, but that's just a simple example. Um, that's sort of-

   12. CWChris Williamson49:12

       (clears throat)

   13. SKSteven Kotler49:12

       ... what the new science of creativity is about.

   14. CWChris Williamson49:15

       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?

   15. SKSteven Kotler49:29

       Oh, um, I don't, um... That's an interesting question. 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. Um, 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 wanna, 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, and what the situation is. Um, but I just-

   16. CWChris Williamson50:27

       I'm gonna 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-

   17. SKSteven Kotler50:36

       I, I think, I think that's true. I like to w- I literally, like, less than seven minutes from the time I, like, roll out of bed to the time I'm, like, sitting at my computer.

   18. CWChris Williamson50:45

       Is that right? What do you do-

   19. SKSteven Kotler50:45

       Yeah, uh-

   20. CWChris Williamson50:46

       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-

   21. SKSteven Kotler50:54

       Brush my, brush my teeth-

   22. CWChris Williamson50:54

       ... normal out of 10.

   23. SKSteven Kotler50:55

       ... go to the bathroom, make my bed, walk from my house to my office, bring my dogs along the way, put a co- put a pot of coffee on, usually do my gratitude practice while the coffee's brewing, and then I w- then I write.

   24. CWChris Williamson51:10

       Mm-hmm.

   25. SKSteven Kotler51:10

       Then I start writing, and I'm usually writing within five minutes. Um-

   26. CWChris Williamson51:14

       I find that interesting-

   27. SKSteven Kotler51:15

       Um-

   28. CWChris Williamson51:15

       ... that your-

   29. SKSteven Kotler51:16

       I, well, the reason is this, flow, among other, flow is great for creativity, it's great for writing, uh, that's my goal when I'm writing. Flow takes place on the borderline from a brainwave perspective between alpha and theta. So wake, normal waking consciousness is beta, it's a fast-moving brainwave. Alpha is daydreaming mode, it's a slower brainwave, it's h- more associated with heightened creativity. Um, and then theta is REM sleep, right? It's, 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, you j- you will jump, your brain will jump up to beta once it starts racing, but you wake up in, 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. Um, and so that's why I, I try to do it. Um...

   30. CWChris Williamson52:29

       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. Uh, what are the things, the most common ways that you see people knocking themselves out of flow? What are, like, the antitheses that people get into-
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Have you considered doing…

   1. SKSteven Kotler1:00:00

      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. That's a lot of people. So it's a big data set. Um, and the thing that matters, seems to make the biggest difference for most people is 90-minute block of uninterrupted 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. So when I'm writing in the morning, I'll give you a really simple example so this isn't 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 gotta 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 1,000 to 1,200. So it moves every day, but I've got my 90-minute block and I know what I'm going to do with it because it's based on the challenge, skills, you know, balance it. 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 ha- like whiz-bang technologies and I don't like substances, um, primarily because I want something that works every time in every situation, and 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, is gonna get you laid. Like it won't get y- it's not sexy. It's not sex. "Dude, I am, I got, I got a 90-minute block of uninterrupted concentration and I, and I'm pushing on the challenge, skills, balance. You wanna come home with me?" (laughs)

   2. CWChris Williamson1:02:20

      Have you considered doing like the flow dating collective?

   3. SKSteven Kotler1:02:23

      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, 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- At 12 years old, I would have given you my arm or at least a finger, right? (laughs) For that information. Um, it was such an imposs- And I was like, "This is, I think the first impo-" Like people are, hear about The Art of Impossible and they're like, "No way, man, I'm not inter- 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 y- why this is funny and why I'm telling you is that the first time a- Art of Impossible hit a bunch of like top Amazon bestseller lists, um, early on. The first one it hit was mating. And (laughs) I like-

   4. CWChris Williamson1:03:35

      No way.

   5. SKSteven Kotler1:03:35

      ... I was like, "How the hell did my book become number o- I was number one in mating?" I was like, "Well, what the hell is mating? Like what does that even mean?" I was, relationships were a different category. Mate seeking, that was it, it was mate seeking. I was like, "Relationships is its own category. What could poss- what is mate seeking? And who at Amazon was smoking what when they come up with mate seeking?" Like, I don't, like is, were the anthropologists getting stoned? Like, what happened there? I'm not, (laughs) I don't get it.

   6. CWChris Williamson1:04:06

      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.

   7. SKSteven Kotler1:04:20

      Thank you for bringing that up. I think it's such, um, it's a, such a simple concept. All right, so let's back up one step. I, as, I, I realize that we're gonna have... Art of Impossible is about 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, um, 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 uninterrupted, these are things that y- anybody can do. The point is that it's about doing them today, doing them tomorrow, doing them ne- 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. 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 it's 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 onto the list, now you do it. It's not debatable. And if it stops being debatable, so much, uh, it just gets so much easier. I al- I like, I like to tell my friend, uh, I was t- it's funny, I was talking to my editor, my, I, 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 then, okay, what did I say? (laughs) 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 he said to me, like, "I just work for the boss. The boss is the guy who wrote the list. You know, I'm just 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-" 'Cause you don't want to work for present tense self. Present tense self is like, "Fuck it, man. Where's the bourbon?" Right? Like, "Bookers and cocaine, man." You know, past tense self is like, "No man, if you really want to get the most out of tomorrow, you're going to go to the gym in the morning, you're gonna start your day with 90 min-" Right? Like, you don't want to work-... for present tense self, unless you have some kind of, like, amazing level of, like, willpower kung fu. Y- 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, and it's not a personal difficulty. It's a... I say this to everybody I work with, and everybody who comes into my company, everybody I work with, and I say, "Look, I am not (clears throat) normal in one particular way, which is, everything I s-... 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 kind of thing. Um, and I find it can be... That... So 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, 'cause most people don't play that way.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:08:26

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

   9. SKSteven Kotler1:08:33

      Right? Because what... The other thing about it that's really good about it is, you're taking yourself and putting yourself in the third. 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... 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 'cause he liked it and you liked it, so it seems to be sticky.

   10. CWChris Williamson1:08:55

       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 in 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.

   11. SKSteven Kotler1:09:24

       So it's interest-... S- so it's interesting. It's, that's not true, but it's really complicated. Why?

   12. CWChris Williamson1:09:31

       (laughs)

   13. SKSteven Kotler1:09:32

       Um, long term... So a couple of things. One, why does time pass so strangely in flo- flow? Let's start there, 'cause this is gonna 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 gonna shut down non-critical structures, liberate some energy." That's why the prefrontal cortex turns off. Time is 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, a couple things are really amazing. 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... Gotta follow the harvest." Like that sort of stuff. Um, there was work by, uh, Jane McGonigal that said that most people have, uh, a 10-year time horizon, and that's like the hard and fast block. And in fact, uh, when we... One of my organizations, Planet Home, uh, we help big companies, uh, basically become very, very environmentally friendly at a really deep level. And we, uh, do it by retrocasting. We say, "Okay, what is the world you wanna live in in 2035? And if that's the case, what has to happen in 2033, '31, right?" And because you... 'cause of those time horizons. So in flow, we don't have those time horizons. You can see much farther into 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, 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, I'll write this thing in two months. I got this." And then you like drop out of flow when time is no longer depressed, 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. So long-term planning in terms of... You wanna 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 (audio cuts out) yeah. But there's a certain coin of like entrepreneurial or cre-... 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? 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, 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 gonna tell me about God, the universe and... I mean, like what? Like get me to the library, then we can have a conversation.

   14. CWChris Williamson1:13:03

       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.

   15. SKSteven Kotler1:13:15

       ... it, it's fantastic for a lot of stuff, but it ... There's, there's places where it gets a little wonky. And it ... I mean, and it does just doesn't go to a little bit of wonky. I mean, of course it's optimal performance, so you would es- expect when optimal (laughs) performance goes wonky, it's gonna go pretty damn wonky.

   16. CWChris Williamson1:13:32

       Goes wonky fast and hard.

   17. SKSteven Kotler1:13:34

       Right?

   18. CWChris Williamson1:13:34

       Yeah.

   19. SKSteven Kotler1:13:34

       It's gonna go fast and hard, and, 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 they're so o- so complexity, which is overwhelming. When the brain encounters information, there's too much information to process by the conscious mind. It has to sort of kick it over and you have an awe experience. So that's often geological time, right? You stand at the Grand Canyon, you, you think, you look, 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, uh, historically based awe experiences, and they often come down with messiah complexes. They think they're Jesus or Moses or Abraham. It's called Jerusalem Syndrome and it's a flow, it's a flow-triggered altered state mental illness. Time is compressed, ego is huge, right? All this history... It's literally, like we write about it. It's a known, it's like a known psychological disorder. Really routine. People show up in, uh, you know, at the hospitals in Jerusalem all the time. By the way, it's not just Jerusalem. So ... 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 that they had to talk

6. 1:15:00 – 1:20:17

   Go away surrogate Jerry.…

   1. SKSteven Kotler1:15:00

      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 need?" I was in that damn camp one day. Um, I never went to see The Dead, but, uh, a, somebody, uh ... So I went to a concert. Dylan and a bunch of people were playing. One of the guys I was with, I didn't even know him, overdosed on acid, tried to take his clothes off, and ru- he's running around the Oakland Coliseum. We're chasing him. The cops are chasing us. Rock Med is chasing the cops, right? All to get the naked guy, um, 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 and 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." You know, if that guy was-

   2. CWChris Williamson1:16:01

      Go away surrogate Jerry. Surrogate Jerry.

   3. SKSteven Kotler1:16:03

      (laughs) Right. Surrogate Jerry. I was like, "Where's my goddamn concert? Get me out of acid lockup. This is no good."

   4. CWChris Williamson1:16:09

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

   5. SKSteven Kotler1:16:23

      I was-

   6. CWChris Williamson1:16:25

      Go ahead.

   7. SKSteven Kotler1:16:25

      Please.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:16:26

      (laughs)

   9. SKSteven Kotler1:16:27

      No, no, go ahead. Yours.

   10. CWChris Williamson1:16:28

       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-

   11. SKSteven Kotler1:16:45

       Yeah, for sure.

   12. CWChris Williamson1:16:46

       ... drop into flow practice that people can do tomorrow?

   13. SKSteven Kotler1:16:51

       Well, everybody has a primary flow activity. This, whatever that's, that, that's whatever you did from the time you were, like, a little kid to now that is deeply absorptive. 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. Everyone'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. 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, uh, all the stress hormones get pushed out of our system. There's a global release of nitric oxide. There's a gas that's signaling molecules everywhere in the body. It pushes stress hormones out of our system, resetting the nervous system toward zero. So we talked about all the problems with anxiety for performance. Flow automatically flushes that stuff out of your system. Also, uh, 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 will heighten, creativity will outlast a flow state by a day, maybe two. And the thing, same thing may be true for, uh, productivity. Um, the creativity research was done by, uh, T- Risa Moll at Harvard. Um, and, uh, productivity we've been working on, um, at the Flow Research Collective. So the ... 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 into flow. Um, 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, um ... (coughs) 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 of Impossible breaks down the flow triggers. Or, you know, stevenkotler.com or flowresearchcollective.com. There's a whole bunch of free stuff. You know, you don't even have to, you know, buy the book. There's a bunch of free stuff that, that will kind of break those things down for you, um, and how to use them. And-... you know, f- primary Flow activity and then start practicing, sort of with the Flow triggers inside of the thing that, you know, is already ch- co- and then start transferring it to other, to other parts of your life. That's where I start. 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. Ten minutes, then five minutes, right? Like don't... It doesn't... There... It is not... Uh, just 'cause 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? Th- 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.

Episode duration: 1:21:52