Steven Kotler - The Art of Achieving the Impossible: A Journey into the Neurobiology of Flow

Welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. Today I am joined by Steven Kotler. Steven is a New York Times best selling author, an award winning journalist, and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. Thank you so much for coming to show, Stephen.

It's good to be with you, Casey.

Well, I've been so fascinated with your work, Stephen, and I know I've listened to other podcasts that you've been on and really excited to dive into the whole realm of human performance with you. And before we dive into your story in that whole world, I would love for you to give the audience some context of what the Flow Research Collective is and a little bit of a high level understanding of what the work that you do.

Perfect. So I'm the executive director of the Flow Research Collective and we study the neurobiology, big word neurobiology of peak human performance. In other words, we study what's going on in the brain, in the body, when people are performing at their very best. And our work is mostly focused on the state of consciousness known to researchers as flow. You may call flow by a lot of other names. Runner side, being in the zone. If you play basketball, it's being unconscious. If you're a jazz musician, you're in the pocket. The lingo is sort of endless. It refers to, technically, it's an optimal state of consciousness. We feel our best and perform our best. More specifically, it's any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. You get so focused on what you're doing, so focused on the task, and everything else just starts to melt away. Right. Self consciousness, sense of self diminishes, time passes strangely, sometimes, occasionally we get that freeze frame effect. My name has been in a car crash much more frequently. Just get so sucked into what you're doing that five hours go by in like five minutes. And throughout, all aspects of performance, mental and physical, go through the roof. So that's at the heart of the work we do at the Flare Research Collective. And essentially we're a research and training organization. On the research side, we do the research I've just been talking about with folks at Stanford and USC and UCLA and UC Davis and on and on and on. And then on the training side, we take what we've learned and we use it to train folks. And we train people, tens of thousands of people every month in 130 different countries. And we're data geeks. So we have like globally diverse and, you know, wildly accurate models of what works and what doesn't. And the folks we train, it's really the whole gamut. Right. Like soccer moms and dads all the way to professional athletes and members of the U. S. Special forces. We work with a lot of companies, whole companies and executive teams and things like that. Facebook, Accenture, Audi, Bain Capital, San Francisco Police Department, the air Force.

Very cool.

So that's. I'll stop there. I think that's the. That's the short, quick and dirty about. About what we do. And I also write books, so a lot of times I write books about what we discover.

That is incredible. And there's so many avenues we can go down it. And speaking of books you've written, is it 13 books now?

14. Well, if you count the audiobook as a book, it's 14. If you don't, it's 13. I don't know what to do.

That is so incredible and more so something that I think would be great to just start on is your new book, nar Country. I would love to start there. Right. When it comes to bringing in these practices that you've been teaching and researching for so many years and applying them to yourself and going through that journey, I would love to give you the opportunity to one, share what this new book is and talk about it before we dive in.

Yeah. Now, our country is sort of a crazy, wild book. My most recent book is two things. It is first, an attempt to solve sort of this ongoing problem I've had in peak performance. Other people have had in peak performance and that all of our clients seem to have, which is for reasons that we can get to if you want. Peak performance is essentially a ch. Well, first of all, what do we mean by peak performance? Peak performance is nothing more or less than just getting our biology to work for us rather than against us to do that. There's a series of things you want to sort of do every day and every week. Right. It's a checklist in a sense. There's other things going on, but it's essentially a checklist. It is really hard at somebody who's at the front end of a journey, a journey who's coming into these ideas of, oh, wow, I can actually do so much more than I thought. What's this about? What's this like at the front end of the journey? Two things are really difficult to understand. One, what does it look like every day? And two, how does this, these little things that you do every day add up into really big leaps? Right. I always say peak performance works like compound interest a little bit. Today it doubles, tomorrow doubles, doubles, doubles. And sooner or later, it starts to get a little exponential that is very hard to convince people of on the front end. So one, our country is this sort of radical experiment in both peak performance and peak performance aging, which is literally just applying the ideas of, of peak performance to the challenges and opportunities in the second half of your life on a day to day basis. So people can really see what does this look like practically. And unlike my other books which I've written about this subject, which are much denser, much more science heavy, this book is application heavy. And so it's essentially an adventure story. And it's much more fun if you're not. If neuroscience isn't your thing. Right. It's much more fun, which means that, you know, it's a lot easier for anybody to sort of get g gain the information. That's the big picture, what the subtle picture is. So there are a bunch of old ideas about aging that in the lab over the past 20 years no longer appear to be true. One of the big ones is the idea that old dogs can't learn new tricks. And so I decided in my 50s, because I'm a little out of my mind, that I was going to try to teach myself, I was going to take a bunch of these new ideas in what you call peak performance aging and blend them together into a learning protocol and see if I could use that to teach myself how to park ski at age 53. And park skiing is the discipline in skiing that involves doing, you know, tricks off jumps on rails and boxes or it's wildly acrobatic, it's dangerous, and for about 12 different biological reasons, it's basically once you're over the age of 35, it's very difficult to learn. 45, you're downright impossible. And by the time you get to 50, 53 when I started, it's just totally crazy and people just laughed at you lit me. But so that's the, the book tells the story of that experiment. The experiment was, was a radical success. It. And, and, and so that's what the, that's what the book is. So it's applied peak performance and a look at, at the sort of the new field of peak performance aging. And the last thing I'm going to say on this because I know there's probably like some large chunk of your listeners who went peak performance aging. What the, what, what the fuck does that have anything to do with me? Right.

Yeah.

And the thing I want to mention before you sort of dismiss all this out of hand is one the peak performance tools work the same at any age. 2. And this is really key one of the. So it's very clear. Aging is a fact of life. It's a process. Old is a mindset, and old is a mindset that starts to set up in our 20s and peak performance aging, actually the mental side of it, the physiophysical side to it, but the mental side of it also starts in our 20s. There's stuff you want to do in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s and your 50s that really will determine the success at the tail end of your life. So that's just the quick caveat, like before I lose a third of the people because they're just like, this doesn't apply to me. No, no, it really actually does.

Yeah, no, I love that and I appreciate you sharing that. And I know when it comes to peak performance overall, that's been something that myself, I've been super interested in the past year. I ran my first marathon last December. And just getting into that mentality to push beyond my limits that I thought were possible, it's been quite the journey. And I would love to ask you, where did this initial desire and passion come from of learning about peak performance and your early 20s? Like, where did this journey begin for you? And what did that early process of wanting to get on this path look like in your life?

So since so many listeners are entrepreneurs, I'll just start with the entrepreneurial side of the story. You gotta understand that a lot of what happens is a solution to I'm a writer. I don't. I wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid. So how the hell do you get paid to be a writer? Right? Like, that's the puzzle I'm trying to solve. I start my career in journalism, and the secret to being successful is journalism is to massively exploit your curiosity. Anything you're curious about becomes articles. And I was very, very curious about two things. One, the obvious, neuroscience and performance based neuroscience. And the reason was in the 1990s, when I started my career, neuroscience went from this transition of like, it was used to be about, like, what is this cluster of neurons, the temporal cortex do? And Right. And suddenly it was about, no, no, what are our emotions and where do they come from? What is consciousness and what are altered states of consciousness? Like, those suddenly became topics we could talk about. And I was fascinated, I was super curious. And I liked neuroscience because I'm interested in human behavior. And I tried psychology and it's squishy and it's subjective and it's individual. And what works for me is probably not going to work for you. But neuroscience is mechanism shaped by evolution. It's shared by all humans and it's basic, it's biological. So if we want something that's reliable and repeatable, it's going to work for you, for me, for everybody. You want neuroscience. So that was part A and part B is totally. The other side of the field is I was obsessed with action sports and if you know. And so I was live writing about now action sports in the early 1990s, it's not mainstream, there's no X Games, there's no Gravity Games. It's this like deep punk rock subculture, right? And it's all this stuff is just getting started. But if you know anything about action sports in the 90s and all of them, surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding, the like, it's often referred to as the era of impossible or more impossible feats. Stuff that had never been done and we thought never would be done, got done. In fact, what was wild about it is you would watch people iterate on the impossible. Like on Monday something that's never been done in history gets done and then like on Thursday somebody does it and like, you know, innovates a little more and next week the function, it's wild. You don't know what's going on. And so the first question was, you know, just simple like what the, what, what the hell is going on? Right? Like how is this possible? I also say it's a really different thing when you see like an athlete do the impossible on a big screen or on your screen when you're living in the community, you go drinking with your friends on Friday night and then you go into the mountains on Saturday morning and everybody's hungover and tired, whatever. And then your friend does something. For all of recorded history that's never been done, it's a very different experience, right? Absolutely on top of it. Especially if you go back into the 90s. What we knew about peak performance could be summed up is it's nature, nurture, it's genetics or it's early childhood experience. And yet like early childhood experience tip. And the other factors that were supposed to play a role, none of them were present. Like everybody I knew, they didn't come from like great childhoods. They came from broken homes and really bad childhoods. They had very little education, they didn't have any money. There was a ton of risk taking these communities and a ton of substance abuse. And normally you put those things together in a Community. People die young and they go to jail. What they don't do is reinvent what's possible for the human species on a regular basis. And that's what was going on. So that was like. As for a guy like me who was curious about peak performance in general anyways, and the neurobiology of it, this was like the greatest puzzle of a lifetime right in front of me. So that's really where it started. It built from there, went a bunch of different directions, got strengthened a bunch of different ways. In the beginning I was covering it as a journalist, and then I was covering it as a book writer, and then I was covering it as a neuroscientist and somebody, you know, leading the research and doing the research. So it's changed how I probed the question too.

Wow, that's actually so cool. I can't imagine early 90s extreme sports. You know, one of my buddies, Dingo, he was, he was involved in the X Games early on, like being the guy that introduces people and just hearing stories from him and even from you, like, that was such a unique era, right?

It was the wild. It was truly the wild, wild west. At a. At a level. It's really hard to explain because you essentially took the most quote unquote extreme people on the planet and you put them together into these incubators. There were only like five or six towns, right? You had Squaw Valley, California, Olympic Valley, California, and Whistler and Jackson Hole, Shamanine, A couple places, a couple surf places. So it was a very small, tight, pretty insane community.

That's insane.

No, I mean, I laugh, but like there's a. So if you're of the generate generation of action sport athletes that I am, I. Then this just happened to me. I sat down with, with one of the early free skiers in Canada. I haven't seen him for 30 years. And we sat down to dinner and he looked at me and said, you know, neither of us were supposed to be 30. And I just started laughing because none of us were supposed to be 30. Right. That was, that was, that was. The other thing about it is it was a deep punk rock subculture.

Yeah, no, that's. That's insane. And I gotta ask, you know, when it comes to that transition initially out of extreme sports, what was that like for you?

It was easy. Easy is the wrong word. So two things facilitated it. One was I was not a professional athlete. I was chasing them around all the time and I kept breaking bones. So there's a certain point where you're just Like I now didn't keep me from action sports, but it kept me from like I just. You can't try to keep up with pros if you're not a pro. You have to. Right?

Yeah.

So that was part of it. The other part of it was as a creative, as a writer. Right. And, and a lot of my friends were filmmakers or artists that sort of things. I started wondering about doing the impossible in creative activities and that led me right into what does it take to do the impossible in business and entrepreneurship. And those are. So if you look at my book, so for example, Tomorrowland is a book about those maverick innovators who took sci fi ideas from the 20th century and turned them into science fact technologies. The people who dreamed up AI, bionics and robotics and all that stuff at the front end when it was literally doing the impossible of dreaming up the future. Or I did Bold. It's a look at upstart entrepreneurs. Larry Pace, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson. People who built world changing businesses in record time. And often if you get under the hood of all those stories, they were in verticals where nobody even thought you could start a company, let alone build a world changing company. Right. And so forth. Abundance was a look at small teams and individuals going after like global impossible challenges. Water, water scarcity, poverty, energy shortages, that sort of stuff. So impossible global challenges. And what's interesting about it, and this is what was so cool for me, and this is where sort of flow comes back into it is when you talk to the export athletes, of course they, we didn't use the term flow back then. Nobody really had that language exactly. But they would all describe like when I'm at my best, I'm in this altered state where every decision, every action flows seamlessly, perfectly. You know, myself is gone, time is strange. And then you go talk to you know, Richard Branson about how he built version and he'll say, yeah, you know, it's because of flow and two hours in flow, there's nothing I can't do. It didn't matter where I went, every domain, because flow is how humans do. We're hardwired for it, right. It's, it's in all of us. So anytime you see the impossible come possible, anytime you see peaking performance, you're seeing the state of consciousness. And that was sort of, you know, that was the most exciting thing in the world is early on when we were, I remember trying to map the early work on flow and the neurobiology of flow was done on Tibetan monks and Buddhists and nuns and people in deep meditation. And it wasn't exactly flow, but they had this experience, meditation of oneness with everything. Right. People would meditate. They feel one with the universe. And I was talking to surfers about what was going on. Laird Hamilton. And they're talking about, I'm one with the wave. And, you know, and it's. And I. So my mentor is a guy named Andy Newberg, and he was the neuroscientist who first put monks into scanners to try to figure out what the hell's going on in the brain when you want with everything. And I remember my whole career started because I called him up, I read about his work, I called him up, I said, look, man, I'm looking at this experience in. In athletes and surfers, and they're talking about becoming one with waves. Do you think that's what's going on? Same thing's going on with your monks. And Andy is great and super curious, just an amazing man. And he said, I don't know, but let's figure it out together. And that was sort of how my career really got started.

That is incredible. It's so unique when you. So I'm actually reading Richard Branson's biography right now, and the things you're saying from the business side, but also I think what's been super. Just. I've noticed such a big difference over the past year from the physical component of, again, running a marathon. Reading Richard Branch's book. He went on this journey of hot air ballooning across the Pacific, and he, as you know very well, he did the impossible. He broke this record. He took a hot air balloon across Pacific. And seeing not only what he did there, but also from a business perspective and taking on new industries, there's. There's so many examples of him doing the impossible. And even to bring it back to a former guest on the podcast, you may know him, James Lawrence. He's known as the Iron Cowboy. And he did 101 Ironmans within 101 days. And I interviewed him before I did my marathon. And, you know, we were just discussing, like, pushing the limit and just what I was able to take through that conversation and then through the experience of running my first marathon, which is completely different than 101 Ironman. It just. It allowed me to really understand my mind from a physical, like, what I'm physically capable of. Right. Versus in a business setting, which is completely different from a, you know, how I think about optimization. I would love for you to bridge that gap Right. There's a lot of business owners that listen to this show. How do you reach flow from a business perspective, but also in a physical perspective? And how are they interchangeable? And how can you bridge that gap for. For people like myself that are, you know, ambitious in business, but also looking to do those extreme adventures and push the limit physically?

Perfect. Perfect. Great question. So flow states have triggers. Preconditions lead to more flow. There are 26 that are. That have been identified. They're probably way more, but that's what we found so far. First thing to know, flow comes in two varieties. Individual flow, me in a flow state, you in a flow state, and then there's group flow. Right. It's a shared collective flow state. Me and you together, which is two people talking. Right. Great conversation. Hours go by. You don't notice. That's known as interpersonal flow. You can have group flow or team flow. Fourth quarter comeback in football or basketball. That's what you're looking at. Great performance on stage, a concert, theater performance. That's what you're looking at. And then there's communitas flow. At scale, you go to a rock concert, everybody merges with the band, each other, all clapping in sync, and one with the crowd. That's communitas. Right. So there are 12 triggers for individual flow, 14 triggers for group flow. There's, as I said, way more. But that's where we are right now. The thing to know is this flow follows focus. The state only shows up when all of our attention is right here, right now. So that's what all the triggers do. They do it a bunch of different ways, neurobiologically, what's going on under the hood. But what they're all doing is they're driving attention into the present moment. So let's talk about your experience. You had running, and one of the things that's so cool about running, and then let's talk about how to apply it to business. So one of the things that you learned about running in training and just talked about it as you pushing yourself a little bit farther every day. A little bit farther. A little bit farther. A little bit farther. Right. So the golden rule of flow, the most important of the flows triggers is what's known as the challenge skills. Balance. Flow follows focus. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch but not snap. If I were to put it emotionally, I'd say sort of near the midpoint between boredom and anxiety. Boredom there's not enough stimulation here. I don't give a shit. I'm not paying attention. Anxiety, well, way too much, right? Too much attention. I can't stop paying attention. In between is the sweet spot. It's what psychologists and flow flow scientists talk about is the flow channel. If you happen to speak physiology and you're listening to this, it's what's known as the er Dobson curve. So depending on which language you learn that it's different. But so let me talk about how this goes right and wrong in entrepreneurship. Okay, so what's and and more than anything else. So one, let's just talk about actions. Let's start with action sports. Years ago the godfather of flow psychology, guy named Mihal Csikszentmihalyi tried to figure out with a Google mathematician the distance between the challenge skills balance. Like what's the ratio? And this is not a real number. This is made up science a metaphor. But it's useful and that's what we're going to talk about it. They came up with a 5% difference. Meaning we pay the most attention to the task at hand. Gives us the greatest chance of getting into flow when the task about 5% harder than our skills. So you're always stretching to the edge of your skill set. Now in athletics we sort of know where that is. It's a little easier to find in entrepreneurship it can be tricky and business can be tricky. So this and it's tricky in two reasons. So if you are shy, if you are meek, if you are timid, if you are risk adverse, it is tricky because it is just outside your comfort zone. So you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. You have to get really good at that. For most entrepreneurs, for most hard charging type A entrepreneurial types, the problem is they love huge challenges. It wakes them up. They will take on a challenge that's 50, 60% greater than their skill set simply because like it keeps them awake. And that is both good and bad. So the research into human motivation shows that these high heart goals are great. They give us an 11, 25% boost in motivation. So you want to set them, it's just that you have to chunk down what's directly in front of you, what you're focused on today. So it's that sweet spot, right? So it's about 5% sweet spot. Now I'll give you two examples in business where we see this being applied. Simple example, I'm a writer, I want to. My, my most important task every day is going to be to advance whatever Book I'm writing now. When I start a book, I write 500 page. 500 words a day. Why is that? Because I can write 350 my eyes closed. But at around 350, I got a transition from one idea to the next. And transitions are hard. So 500 words, I'm stretching. It's going to take a while. But I'm not snapping in the middle of the book. I sort of know where I'm going. So it's about 750 words. End of the book. I really know where I'm going is about a thousand point here is you got to sort of find your edge. So that's an example of what it looks like in business. Myself, what does it look like at a corporate. Corporate level. The classic example is Toyota, actually. So in the 80s, Toyota is just another car company. It becomes the globally dominant car company in the 90s. Why? New management philosophy. Kaizen. Kaizen is two flow triggers combined into a single idea. It's the idea of continual improvement. It so autonomy is a flow trigger. When we are driving the bus, we care about more where it's going, right? So we pay more attention to the stuff we're doing. So Kaizen basically says, you work at Toyota. Let's say you work on the assembly line doing a job that has, you know, what we feel is totally mechanical. You put hubcaps on tires, ownership comes to you, says, no, no, no, that's. That's a part of your job. That's what you do. But your real job is to make the entire line better, to make the whole hubcap entire process better. It continuously improve Toyota as a whole and our cars. And suddenly employees went from, I'm doing mechanical labor to, holy fuck, I can improve Toyota. I got autonomy. The challenge just went up. I know. And the result was tons of flow. Flow underpins peak performance. The results was global car company dominance. So one trigger, bunch of different examples.

No, that is very cool to hear. And it gets me thinking, you know, from the different life cycles of a business, are there specific, you know, flow triggers that come into play with a, you know, a team of five people to 50 to 500 to 5,000? And what are your thoughts on, you know, the growth of a company and how you can tap into different flow triggers and, you know, what's most optimal?

That is interesting for a bunch of reasons. The first is nobody's ever asked me that question, which is kind of miraculous and wild. And let me just be truthful. I don't have a freaking clue. I don't think anybody's ever looked. And, but, but, but. Let me pause. So let me, let me go through a bunch of flow triggers. So one of the ways that flow triggers work is they drive dopamine into the brain. Dopamine. We all know what dopamine is. We've heard about. It's a reward chemical. It's a focusing chemical that underpins excitement. Right. Think about when your phone dings something. You can't stop paying attention to your phone. That's what dopamine does to focus. It makes us excited and it focuses us on the thing in front of us. Right, the task.

Yep.

So bunch of the triggers drive dopamine novelty, novel environments drive dopamine. Complexity, unpredictability, risk, physical risk, emotional risk, social risk, intellectual risk, creative risk, all of those things. And pattern recognition also drives dopamine when we link ideas together in a new way. So what I have just explained is that startups freaking packed with flow triggers. They're packed, which is why if you've ever been involved in a startup, getting to launch, it's incredibly high flow. Right. It's almost like a group flow experience after group flow experience after group flow experience after group flow experience. And what happens at launch, the flow all goes away because the jobs get routinized, right? Yep. And so I, I joke. So Peter Diamandis, who I've written a number of books with and who's a very, very close friend of mine and who I've known forever, you know, I've been involved in 22 startups. Peter's been involved, oh my goodness, eight or 29. And we laugh because this is total flow junkie behavior. Flow junkie is like, you know, we want to get the company off the, off the ground and then like interest waivers, you want to get to the next thing. Right. So that is, that's actually a problem with companies. Right. You have to, you have to steer around that kind of behavior. You have to know it's coming and, and sort of prepare for it. And it's not that the triggers shift so much, but the ways we utilize them shift. And I'll give you a simple example. All the triggers, I named those dopamine triggers that show up the front end, we trade them for a much subtler, more complicated set of group flow triggers to ma to get that same bunch of group flow. Now suddenly things like close listening, where, you know, I'm listening to you, I'm not trying to finish your sentences or anticipate what I'm going to say next, or Think about that mean thing you just said. Right? I'm fully with you in the present moment, right? Yes. And isn't a group flow trigger so yes and games, Right. I never say no. So, right. If it's. It comes out of improv. First rule of improv is, you know, you come up to me and you're like, stephen, there's a blue elephant in the bathroom. If I say, well, shut up. No, there's not. It's not funny, goes nowhere. But I'm like, oh my God, there is. I hope he's not using all the toilet paper. Now we've got a skit, right? It's rolling, it's moving somewhere. That's a yes and game. So what it basically tells us is that conversations need to be additive and not argumentative. And that doesn't. So one thing for ODBA who hear this, this doesn't mean. So the problem with brainstorming sessions where nobody has critical feedback is group think, you get lukewarm, mediocre ideas. So when I say yes and I can say to you, so let's say you just pitched me something and most of it, I don't like what I, how I do it is I'd be like, Casey, you know, 90% of what you just said I'm not down with. I don't agree with. But you had that little nugget about the blah, blah, blah and let's. And I'm. And there we're off and running. So. Right. You can be critical, but you're still playing yes and games. So what happens as companies start to shift is the triggers they're leaning on are going to start to shift a little bit. And that, that's a little bit different.

Yeah, there's.

I have, there's, there's probably a better, there's probably bigger, better answers to your question too. But nobody's actually asked me the life cycle of company flow trigger question before. But you know, I'm taking it back to my team because it's a cool idea.

I'm glad. I was just curious about it. No, the, the, that idea of flow triggers in the company lifecycle. I just came to me and I was curious for you for context. I had a startup that I recently got acquired back in September of last year we launched it. It was 12 months from start to acquisition and I just reflecting on that journey the past six months post acquisition has leading up to this conversation and just understanding flow and where I felt the most creative and the most output versus stagnant. And in that Mindset of like oh, how do we get ahead? How do we keep the ball rolling? I just noticed like that in that company from like you know, just a co founder to 10 employees, it was such a, there were so many different phases. Right. And it was only 12 month journey from start to exit. But just taking that concept and I was just curious about that question and I definitely appreciate you let me say.

Yeah, let me say one other thing that I derelict and not saying. So the other thing to know is how trainable this stuff really is. So I told you a little about the collective training people. 130 countries and whatever. Our average training is about eight weeks long. It's digital and you go through a PhD psychologist as a coach. Not easy is my point. There's homework it, you got to lean in. But we measure everything pre and post. On the back end of an eight week training we see a 70 to 80% boost in flow and that's pretty standard. It goes up and down the la. We, we data capture roughly every three months and I think in the last batch it was 71.25% we increase in flow on average. So my point is this stuff is very, very trainable. We can get a lot better at this stuff. So when we talk about peak performance being available to any, we talk about flow underpinning peak performance. We talk about all aspects, you know, improving. This is the thing we can all tap into. You must have had a crazy flow journey. One year to exit. That's very fast.

Thank you, thank you and I appreciate that. It's definitely quite frankly coming out of that. The past six months I've been fully immersed in this whole idea of optimization. It got the cold plunge, I got my sleep data. I'm really just trying to optimize when do I feel best. And it's led me to now having all these different discussions with friends and people that take this stuff seriously. And I'd love to ask you when it comes to your personal ability to get into flow, how has that changed for you over the years in a business setting, in a, in an extreme sports setting? And what is your, you know, just most optimized state and how do you achieve that?

Well that's a little more complicated of an answer. So what I will tell you is the state has become a lot of this is the result of science. Right. We understand it better. So but it's, it's gone from something that was sort of really mystical, hard to produce, something that's reliable and repeatable, something that I can sort of trust. I know how to utilize it, I know how to get there. It's not 100%, but. And usually if I don't, I don't end up in flow. When I'm trying, I can put my finger on the reason, like which small constellation. But so that's, I, that's changed a lot over the years and my protocols aren't. I mean they're based on sort of biology. So the same, a lot of the stuff I do is the same stuff we're training people to do because it's, it's, it's built on the biology of it. I can go into ton of detail. Where do you, where do you want me to. Where do you want me to go?

Yeah, I guess, you know, a lot.

Of this is obviously what's covered in sort of nar countries. Like what is it? Yeah, of course, day to day basis kind of thing. But point. Give me a little, A little bit.

Yeah, here's, here's some context. Like for example, as someone that I respect so much as an author, you've written 14 books. Someone that I also love as an author that I've had in the podcast many times is Robert Greene. And we were talking about, you know, 48 laws of power and all these different books and how he's achieved his flow and he kind of gave me some behind the scenes in his. When I went to his house to do the podcast of like how he writes his books and where he feels the most in. I don't know, he probably didn't say the word flow. But like when he feels the most optimized and when he can get the most done. I would love to know, just in the context of the question, like where how do you feel the most in the context of let's say writing a book or in a productive setting.

I get up, I'm so. And I'll just, I'll give you the peak performance tip and then I'll tell you how I do it. So one, you want to start your day or your work session with your hardest for task first. Right. And you want to align your work session with your circadian rhythms. I'm an extreme lark. I like to get up really early. I get up at 3:30 or 4:00 clock in the morning. My wife, I'm married to a night owl. She doesn't really start. Her brain doesn't really Turn on till 4 or 5 in the evening. Right. Most people are actually. Their brain sort of peaks at 9am which is why work starts then. Right. But I get up every day at 4am when you wake up, your brain is producing alpha waves. Creativity has an alpha wave signature. So what I try to do is go from bed to my desk. My office is not in my house, it's literally next door to my house. So literally I try to go from like bed to desk in under five minutes. It's like bed to desk with coffee brewing in under five minutes. And immediately into the writing. And complete concentration is a flow trigger. So this means I've prepared my space. That means distraction management. There's no email, no text, no messages, right? All that stuff's turned off. My phone's off. I actually keep the lights in my office off. And I leave. I write in Microsoft Word, which has Focus View and I literally, I just look at the words. So I will. The night before I prepare my office and I've turned everything off and all I'm looking at is the words. The coffee is ready, I just have to flip the switch and you know, I'm writing.

Wow.

And so I will work, I will write depending on 4 to 7 or 4 to 8am wow. It depends. And that is immediately followed by hiking my dogs to the backcountry. There are reason, there are flow reasons for this as well. Flow states are not a binary. You're not in the zone or out of the zone. It's actually a four stage cycle. There's a struggle phase on the front end, then a relaxing, a release phase. You take your mind off the problem and the flow state itself and then a recovery state on the back end because flows biologically expensive produce. So if I the writing goes well and I got into flow right, I want a recovery activity on the back end. And a walk in nature is actually a really good recovery activity. If I'm in struggle and super, super frustrated, I need to take my mind off the problem. And low grade physical activity works really well for that. So thus a walk in nature. Now I do a bunch of other things on that walk that we're not going to have time to go into depending on sort of where I am or what I am. But people always ask like, you know, how is it that, you know, how did you write so many books? And the reason is, you know, I write. There are some days I'll write all day and I have two big editing sessions where I work with my editor every week on top of it. But I will write four hours a day, seven days a week, no matter what.

Wow, that is just hearing that, it's so great. I'm Someone that just hearing the context and understanding your flow is very, very unique. And I'm sure the listeners really appreciated that. So I appreciate you sharing that last question before we start to wrap up here. Steven, as you said at the beginning of this podcast, which I know people heard, is you and the people that you work with have trained tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands, all over the world, 130plus countries. If you were to give a business owner or someone that was really looking to just start that journey to optimize and get into flow, what would, what would you tell them is a great first step? And of course, you know, I want to make sure they, they know where to go to learn more because it's so, I mean, there's so much work out there.

I'm going to give you two answers. I'm going to give you one that's going to sound self serving, but I think it's probably the best first step for your listeners. If you're curious, you can literally. I apologize for the cheesy URL. Get more flow.com. i love it. If you go to getmoreflow.com you can literally sign up for a free hour long coaching call with somebody on my team. They'll tell you about our programs, but mostly they're just going to listen to your life and tell you sort of how to sort of use flow and use people to fine tune it, tell you what's available. That is a really great place to start if you want to go, you know, a little deeper. Nar country is the new book, my older book, the Art of Impossible. Both are sort of flow bibles. The art Impossible is more science gnar has more applied peak performance. And you know that you can read them together separately, whatever. And those. That's my super self serving answer. Now let me give you a totally different answer. Okay. And you can sort of take your pick though. The truth of the matter is it doesn't. You can walk through door number one or door number two because you can end up at the same place one way or another. So I have to tell you a couple more things about flow and then I'm going to give you my, give you the thing to do. So the first thing you need to know about flow is that flows are sort of a focusing skill. So the more flow you get, the more flow you get. So if I go skiing on Sunday and get into a flow state, I'm going to have an easier time Tuesday at work getting into flow. The other things I need to tell you Are that inflow some of the things that gets heightened overall, huge impact on mood, happiness, well being, overall life satisfaction. Right. Psychologists now define the upper two tiers of happiness with flow baked into the discovery. But so the heightened mood you get in a flow state, which is a huge boost in mood, will outlast the flow state by a day, sometimes two. Creativity spikes and flow. Creativity and innovation spikes and flow, which is why this is so important in entrepreneurship. And it's, it's a huge number. It's 400 to 700 depending on how we're measuring. And a lot of different people, like we've done that in our lab, they did it at Harvard, they did the University of Sydney. It's like pretty well established that you get this big spike and that they figured this out at Harvard, will outlast the flow state by a day maybe too. So this huge spike in creativity and huge spike in mood will outlast the flow state. Plus it's this focusing skill. And the third thing you need to know is when we move into flow, so there's a global release of nitric oxide, it pushes stress hormones out of our system and it resets the nervous system back to zero. So in our over anxious world where we're all hyper vigilant all the time that hyper vigilance costs us, it's actually that those stress hormones really, they're taxing on the body, but they block learning, they block creativity, they block performance. There's problems with it. So flow resets the nervous system. So all of these are performance benefits that accrue no matter how you get flow. Right. And so what I always tell people is the place to start is with what's known as your primary flow activity. This is whatever you've done since you were a little kid most likely to drop you into flow. For me it is skiing. For my wife it is hiking the dogs to the back. My best friend, it's playing the guitar. My other best friend, it's gardening, drawing, coding, dancing, samba dancing, salsa take on and on and on, right? Wrapping it doesn't, it doesn't really matter. The list is really endless. But we tell people, double down on your primary flow activity. And this. So the thing is, and this is maybe the thought I'll leave every Rudy with is even in your 20s, right? And I'm sure you're doing this in your head a little bit. So I remember I said earlier that old is a mindset, right? And sets up early. One of the things that starts happening in your 20s is you start A you hear the voice in your head going, are you too old for this shit? And you start making right, you start putting aside childish things. The skateboard goes away, the surfboard goes away. I'm going to focus on my business, I'm going to focus on my relationship, whatever, right? Those are the things we start doing. And from a performance perspective, it's a disaster. It's actually a really bad idea. The more flow you get, the more flow you get. You want to keep those things integrated in your life as much as possible. So double down on your primary flow activity. Go to getmoreflow.com Sign up for, for that free informational interview. Read a bunch of books. You know, I love it. And, but that's, those are the places I would, I would start. And I also think, you know, as you learn from running the marathon, like when you get into flow and use flow to expand what's possible for yourself, it unlocks the next possibility, space. And then you get flow, get into flow and expand. And that's how. Right. This is sort of the path to impossible. And it's, it starts with like small I impossible. The that we think is impossible for ourselves, not capital I impossible. That which has never been done. It's small I, I, I was a writer. I came out of Cleveland. I didn't know any writers. I didn't know how you became a writer. It was like one day I woke up and said, today I got to be an elf. You know what I mean? Like, it was a small I impossible. Yeah. Statistically, there's really poor odds of success and there's no clear path between point A and where I want to go, point B. That's a small I impossible. And by like small I impossible after small I impossible after small impossible, you sort of sometimes end up accomplishing capital I impossible along the way.

I absolutely love that, Steven. And I learned so much today. And I want to say thank you so much for coming on the show. And outside of the website that you mentioned, where is the best place where people can follow you on social and just stay connected with you overall?

Yeah, you can. Stevencottler.com is is me. You can, you can find me on the Instagram. If I could remember what my goddamn Instagram name is. That's so funny. It's at stevencottler. I can't believe I just blanked out. What Instagram was funny. I felt really dumb.

I love it.

Yeah. At Stephen koller on Instagram. Stephencottler.com flowresearchcollective.com getmoreflow.com I think that's all of it. Or enough of it. You can find.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Thank you, Stephen.