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

... 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.

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

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.