Interview: The Rise of Superman with Steven Kotler

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I am thrilled to be chatting with Steven Kotler, who's written a number of books. Today we're going to talk about the Rise of Superman, subtitled Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance. Stephen is one of the world's leading authorities on the science of flow. He created something called the Flow Genome Project that is all about decoding the peak performance state of flow. He's also an extraordinary and award winning writer. In this book, Stephen tells the stories of extreme sports athletes and how over the last several decades, they've exponentially pushed the realm of what was impossible into the possible. And he kind of taps into that and unlocks how they went about doing that and how we can do it in our lives. So, Stephen, love your book. Really appreciate you taking the time to chat and excited to explore some of my favorite ideas.

Well, thank you. I'm glad to be here.

All right, let's start at the top. So, the Rise of Superman, one of the coolest phrases and book titles I've seen. What were you thinking when you named the book that?

Well, some of this book emerged out of. I started my career as a journalist and this was in the early 90s. And if you could ski or surf or rock climb or any of that stuff, well, action sports was just happening in the mainstream. Level X Games was going on and whatnot. So if you could sort of do any of those things, there was work. I couldn't do any of those things very, very well, but I needed the work. So I spent roughly the first five or six of my years of my career chasing action adventure sport athletes around the world. And being not a professional athlete myself, I broke a lot of bones along the way. And what kept happening was I'd be hanging out with guys and I'd see stuff that really, it looked like absolute magic. The best example of skiing. I started out all this. I thought I was an expert skier. And the first time I actually got on a mountain with pro, what were then called extreme skiers, I didn't even know what I was looking at. They were doing stuff that not only was impossible, it looked like it defied the laws of gravity. Impossible. And I would break a leg or something like that, and I'd go away for a year or two, come back, and the level of performance had jumped so startlingly far the time I was gone that even if I had, like struggled all that period to Sort of catch up. It was, you know, it was unfathomable. Again, it was this huge kind of quantum leap and it kept happening and kept happening and kept happening. And you know, the only way you could describe it was kind of in comic book terms. So the rise of Superman kind of came out of watching kind of this progression in action, in adventure and wondering what the hell was causing it.

That's awesome. And then I love the theme through the book is, look, we're going to look at these extreme sports athletes and kind of decode what it is they're doing and then apply it to our lives. And your challenge in the book is, I love the way you say the people involved in these exercises and activities rather are highly trained professionals. So please, please, please try them at home. Do this. You need to rise. We need to rise if we want to meet the challenges that our world faces. Right?

Well, it was, I mean, you know, it wasn't just action adventure sport athletes. What has happened kind of over the course of my career is I've gotten to study kind of high performing individuals everywhere, whether it's kind of US Navy Seals to the action adventure sport athletes, to top technology executives. Take your pick kind of across the board. And it really doesn't matter where we look, right? Ultimate human performance has a signature, shows up in the same way everywhere we look. And it's always presents is the state of consciousness we know as flow. So the action adventure sport athletes got really good at flow. But I realized we could kind of take what they were doing, take the advances that neuroscience had made in the past 20 years at decoding this state, and sort of work backwards from what they were doing to the mainstream.

That's awesome. So let's go there. So talk to us about flow, which is the essential attribute that all these peak performers get into.

Technically, it's defined as an optimal state of consciousness. It's a state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best and more familiarly. It's those moments of rapt attention and total absorption, right? Where you get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. And it's got a number of strange characteristics. So once things start disappearing, our sense of self vanishes, our sense of self consciousness goes away. Time passes strangely, most of the time it speeds up and five hours will pass by in like five minutes. Occasionally it'll slow down, you'll get that freeze frame effect. Maybe anybody who's been in a car crash or seen the Matrix and throughout all aspects of performance, mental and Physical go through the roof.

Yeah, go on. I mean, this is. Yeah.

So that's your quick and dirty definition of flow.

Yep. And then what's. So theoretically, flow is the state. And you walk us through the history in a really fascinating way, from that earlier explorer to William James and Canon and Maslow and Csikszemihalyi. I want to focus on more of what we can do to apply this stuff in our lives and leave the reader or listener to go check out the book for more of those details. So you talk a lot in the book about the flow triggers and how we can get there. I have some of my favorites. But what are some of your favorite flow triggers to help us get into this state more consistently?

So the first thing to know kind of is what I mean by flow trigger, right? These are preconditions that lead to more flow. And more specifically, flow is what happens when all of our attention gets focused in the present moment. So what these triggers really are there's 18 of them, and they're the 18 things our brain thinks are most important in the world that evolution shaped our brain to pay the most attention to. So when you're kind of hacking flow, when you're playing with the flow triggers, we. What you're really doing is using kind of basic evolutionary biology to your advantage. And I think one of the reasons I'm probably a good flow researcher is I actually have a very hard time getting into deep flow states. I am an action adventure sport athlete myself. So obviously risk is a great trigger, right? Flow follows focus and consequences catch our attention. So I think physical risk is fantastic. Creativity is another flow trigger. And I make my living as a writer and that's what I do almost all day, every day. And creativity is another flow trigger. And what I mean by that is pattern recognition, where ideas get linked together, right? And we've all kind of had experience with this trigger. Underneath it is the neurochemical dopamine, which is a performance enhancing, feel good neurochemical that say you fill out the right answer in a crossword puzzle, right? Your brain connects some patterns together. You get that right answer. That little rush of pleasure you get is, is dopamine. It drives focus, and by driving focus, it drives flow. Right? So creativity in writing, when sentences start coming together and the ideas really start pulling together, that's probably my favorite trigger. It's also probably the trigger that I think most people in the world depend on.

Yeah, that's awesome. And one of my favorites is the challenge to skill ratio and the flow channel. I'D love to unpack that with you a bit more. Can you talk to us about for.

Sure what we learned in that? Yeah, it's the big discovery, the challenge. Skills balance is what Csikszentmihalyi dubbed the golden rule of flow. And the idea, right. Flow follows focus. So we may pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set. Right. The important thing here is you want to stretch but not snap. To put it emotionally, flow exists near the midpoint between boredom. Hey, there's not enough stimulation here. I'm not paying attention. And anxiety. Whoa, Way too much stimulation. I can't take it anymore. In between is this sweet spot. What's tricky about it is that for people who are not really used to pushing themselves very hard, this sweet spot is the point at which you start to get uncomfortable. You're outside your comfort zone, so you're feeling discomfort. For really high performers, the problem with the sweet spot is the exact inverse. It's a lot lower than most people think it is. And most people end up biting off challenges that are much, much bigger than they should be. And it creates too much fear, and it actually blocks the state of flow, which is the very thing they need most to achieve that challenge.

I love it. And you unpack this really, really well in the book. And I just found it so inspiring. It's one of the things that I ripped on in our note and episode. You used the actual number 4% to capture this idea of, look, it's not 40% or 400%. It certainly isn't 400% or 4,000 or 40,000%. Don't snap, just stretch. 4%. Can you tell us about what that 4% kind of feels like from your perspective?

Yeah. First of all, I got to give you a little background on it because it came out of a calculation Csikszentmihalyi had performed with a Google mathematician. It was a total made up number. It was an exemplar. It was a back of the envelope thing. And they were trying to figure out what is this ratio. So they did this back of the envelope calculation. And I saw that and I thought, wow, that's unreal. That's a lot lower than I thought it was going to be. How surprising. And I took it into the flow genome project and we sort of ran a loose study, just like friends and family kind of study, nothing formal, mostly with action adventure sport athletes, because we found we could, for example, if you're a downhill mountain biker, you could sort of figure out where you are and all the other features, the jumps and the tricks and all the that were on the mountain that you couldn't do. And you would rate them how much harder percent wise than your current ability, usually based on how much fear did they actually strike in your heart? It was totally back in the envelope, right? What has happened since rise of Superman has come out is that people that we work with in the flow genome project have done this more and more and more and more rigorously and really kind of gotten detailed with it. And they done it with kind of athletes at every level and people in society at every level. And once again, everybody has found, even though it started out as a back of the envelope calculation that Csikszent Mei performed, everything that we've done has borne it out. So now we're actually on the front end of starting much more rigorous studies. But the most important thing I think about that 4% is it's really, it's liberating on the front end. It actually ends up feeling a little bit like a prison on the back end. And let me explain the difference with 4% is it's a lot smaller than you think it is, which is awesome. You can wake up every morning and think today I'm going to write 4% harder than I did yesterday, or I'm going to push 4% harder on my research project than I did yesterday, or however it is. And you can sort of measure it out and go that way. But what it really means is it's 4% day after day, week after week, month after month. And it requires an extraordinary level of kind of emotional control and grit that is only possible because flow is such an amazingly feel good high that all this grit is worth it because the payoff is huge.

This is so good. And it's exactly where I wanted to go next, which is, it's 4%, which is exciting, as you said. It's awesome that we can actually tap into that consistently. Can I be 4% more focused or 4% more efficient today, Whatever the standard is, and then show up day in and day out and let that compound effect overlaps time lead to, as you say, the impossible becoming what's for breakfast, right? Or just another day at the office kind of thing. Whether it's Laird Hamilton starting at whatever size wave up to his monster wave, the other examples that you use. And that leads us perfectly to another huge distinction that I loved of your kind of alternative theory on mastery. And I joking, well, you call it the three M's, right? And I kind of jokingly called it M cubed. Right. Mothers, musicians and marshmallows. And then your path to mastery sans misery, I just love. So I'd love for you to kind of frame that for us, then we can drill into it a little bit more.

Well, there are a lot of ideas on how do we get to mastery, right. And they all sort of come down to a lot of delayed gratification, willpower, a lot of self control, a lot of I'm going to be miserable for a really long time and I'm going to grind it out. And if you look at action adventure sport athletes, for example, artists or people who have a lot of flow in their life, that is not the approach they take at all. They take a much more playful approach. And the interesting thing is because their approach generates more flow. I won't go into a whole lot of neuroscience here, but underneath a flow state, one of the things that happens is the brain releases five or six of the most potent feel good neurochemicals we can get our hands on, one of which is dopamine. We mentioned it a second ago. Flow is the only time you get this cocktail of feel good drugs. Which means flow is the most addictive state on earth, right? It feels amazingly good. That drives motivation. That's fantastic. Which drives you farther and faster along the path towards mastery. But equally important, a quick shorthand for learning and memory and mastery is that the more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, the better chance that experience has a moving from short term holding into long term storage. One of the things neurochemicals do is they're sort of big neon signs over experiences saying really important, save for later, right? Flows, this giant cocktail, get big neurochemical dump as a result. As a result, learning goes through the roof. You get massively accelerated learning. In studies run by the US military, they found that snipers in flow, for example, learned Target acquisition skills 500% faster than normal. A lot of other studies have backed this up. And what it suggests is that those fabled 10,000 hours to mastery, the science shows that flow can cut it in half. So not only do you can be a lot less miserable along the way and you can get there a lot faster.

Yeah, that's awesome. And then the important point you make and you quote Shane McConkey, who's got that great quote that you share of, if you're doing what you love to do all the time, then you're happy you're not going to work every day, wishing you're doing Something else. I get up and go to work every day and I'm stoked. That does not suck where they're so.

Shame, by the way. That does not suck is such a shame statement.

You brought him to life so well, in the book where as you said, as Maslow says, right. The dichotomy between work and play dissolves of what am I doing right now? Am I working or am I playing? There's no delay of the gratification because we're entering the most amazing state possible. And as you said, it makes our desire to jump into it. I think the phrase you used was feverish compulsion, where there's no delayed gratification. The path is what we most enjoy doing, which also happens to accelerate the whole process of mastery. Right.

And you got to think about how important this really is across all walks of society. We're talking about action, adventure, sport, athletes. But a recent Gallup survey found that 83% of American workers are disengaged or actively disengaged on the job. So four out of five of us hate what we do with the majority of our time. The remainder have jobs that produce flow. Show up early, stay late, can't wait to be at work. Love the experience. The high performers every organization wants to build on and the high performers every person really wants to be.

Amen. So the question again becomes, well, how do we get into that? Right. And I think that you talk a lot about reframing things as well, in the context of impossible, et cetera. And just the idea of you can reframe. You don't need to follow these other alternate paths to mastery. You just need to invest some energy into structuring your life such that flow is a more likely outcome for you more consistently. Right.

I appreciate the soft sell, yes, you're absolutely correct. But what we have seen consistently over and over is the people who are best at this put flow at the absolute center of their lives. The corporations that are best at this, the organizations that are best at this make flow and producing more flow the primary. Let me put some numbers around that so you can understand why. McKinsey did a 10 year study of top executives in flow and they found that top executives are 500% more productive in flow than out of flow. That's a step function's worth of change. That's huge. Patagonia, which is a company that has built their corporate philosophy around flow. One of the ways they've done it is Patagonia is run by Yvon Chouinard, who is an ex surfer and rock climber. And their corporate headquarters is right on the Pacific. And Yvonne has a let my people go surfing house policy, which means whenever the waves are up, anybody, anywhere in Patagonia, it doesn't matter if you're in the middle of a meeting. You can walk out, you can go surfing. Why? Because it doesn't matter if you take two hours off and go surfing. You're going to come back and be 500% more productive.

And so then, to be very clear, they structure their entire lives. I've soft selled it before, but let's be clear, right? They're structuring their entire lives around entering the state as consistently as they possibly can, period.

Yeah. And you know, it's also what I've done, what, you know, Jamie Wheal, the co founder of the Flow Genome Project, has done with his life. And you know, what everybody we've kind of we've worked with over the years seems to have done as well. So it doesn't. It sounds a lot more extreme than I think it plays out as, but, yeah, it's fundamental and it becomes the center.

Well, and one of the things I talked about in the note is another idea from Csikszentmihalyi that I think you touched on a little bit, but just the overall paradox of work. We have this story that we're going to be happiest in leisure, and the reality is we're happiest when we're engaged. So just breaking that down and realizing, no, this is the avenue through which we're going to experience the optimal human experience alone kind of starts breaking down some of the weird dichotomies that exist. Right.

Well, I think, you know, I'm glad you brought that up because I think one of the fundamentals of kind of flow hacking is the realization it takes a long time to kind of figure this stuff out. And I think everybody sort of has to learn it for themselves. I can talk about it, but it's best experienced is that when it comes to actual high performance, when it comes to generating flow, a lot of the stuff that we've been led to believe, really fundamental stuff like what do our emotions mean? Turns out, for example, with ultimate human performance, a lot of your emotions mean the exact opposite of what you think they mean. And let me give you a really clear example. You gave one about work and play, but let me give you another example that's at the start of this. So one of the things we know about flow is it's not a light switch, it's not A binary. You're not in the zone or out of the zone. It's actually a four stage process. And each stage, there's precise kind of neurobiological changes underneath each stage. You can't live in a permanent flow state because a lot of these couple of these stages are very unflowy. And you have to go through all four stages before you can get back into a flow state. So mastering the flow cycle alongside mastering the flow triggers is really key. And the front edge of the flow cycle is a struggle phase. And to understand the struggle phase, the first thing you need to know is that what's happening in flow at a really broad, big level is you're trading explicit or conscious processing for implicit or subconscious processing. And you're doing this for a number of reasons. Primarily because the subconscious is far faster and has far more RAM than the conscious mind. Right. But to get there on the front end, you first have to load the conscious mind with all the material that you need your subconscious to be able to process. You have to automatize a lot of skills to use kind of the formal terms. So the front end of a flow state is known as struggle because it is a loading phase. You are loading and overloading the brain with information. And by overloading what I mean, it's kind of a technical thing, but you have a working memory. It's all the stuff you can think about all at once. And honestly, it's very, very powerful. It can do a lot of cool things with the stuff you can think about, but you can hold about four ideas in your head at once before the brain is overloaded. So when you're trying to learn a skill, it is very easy to get overloaded. Right. When you're trying to write a report, once you're kind of juggling more than four ideas, it is very easy to get overloaded. This is the struggle phase. It is incredibly, incredibly frustrating. Normally we think of frustration as bad. I'm really, really frustrated. I've got to stop. I'm going in the wrong direction. In this work, it is a sign that you're moving in the right direction. So even though it feels like crap, what it actually means is you're doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing and you're moving in the right direction. Good job. Keep going.

I love it. And it's actually the next idea I wanted to talk about, which is you describe it as fear. Frustrationpain becomes our compass. It's not something we try to get around. We realize, wow, that's the edge the 4% I need to lean into if I want to enter this flow state consistently on a micro level right now and on a macro level as I build my skills. Right.

Fear is another one. Exactly where we believe that fear means turn around, run away, go the other direction, because that's what it feels like. Right? But in fact, what you learn in this work is there are obvious exceptions, of course, but usually exactly what you're looking for is on the other side of that fear. So you have to move through it. And what happens is you gain a very good compass in life fear. If something is really scaring you, that's the direction you need to go in.

Yeah, I love that. One of the guys we love, Phil Stutts and Barry Michaels, who wrote a great book called the Tools. Their first tool is this. They call it reversing desire, where rather than avoid the things that you're afraid of or find painful or frustrating, you say bring it on. And you know your potential is on the other side of them. But I love the way you frame it where it's 4%. We don't need to go crazy here, you know.

Well, that's, I mean, that's, you know, that's the big lesson is you have to be uncomfortable, but it is a manageable level of uncomfortability. And in fact, we see this from the action sport athletes, we see this from kind of US spec ops and even in business people who feel like the misnomer is the adrenaline rush. Right. If you're talking about action sports, most athletes, if they're feeling adrenaline, they're feeling too much fear, it's a sign that they should back off. This is outside their challenge skills sweet spot. They need to save it for another day.

What we're saying here is, yeah, we have a healthy relationship. There's so much that comes into my mind as you describe that. It's so liberating. Combined with what we just talked about of just give it time, compound that over an extended period of time, you can do extraordinary things. Related to that is the word impossible. So how we get to the state of being able to do the impossible consistently, which is really a theme of your life's work, right? With flow, with bold, with abundance. It's how do we approach these impossible challenges and realize we can do a heck of a lot more than we think? And you use the story of Roger Bannister to bring the point home. Can you talk to us about that word impossible and how you approach it and how you recommend we approach it?

So I talked about Bannister because there's something called the banister effect, which is this very peculiar thing. So Roger Bannister, right? First guy to run the four minute mile. And if you look at history, look at the kind of mile times it was, we went down by a tenth of a second a year basically for 50 years, right? The last ten seconds of getting that mile, of getting to the four minute mile took forever. And then Bannister broke the record. And within 10 years, four or five other people had run four minute miles, including a teenager. So the question is, what the hell is it about finding out that the impossible might be possible that makes it suddenly possible? The physical challenge of running a 4 minute mile had not changed, it's still a 4 minute mile. The mental challenge had changed, the barrier had fallen. And why is that and what does it mean? And a lot of it has to do with that 4% sweet spot. We've been talking about a lot of what happens when you hear something is possible if it's in your field, for example. And so it's not like you hear Laird Hamilton surfed a 50 foot wave and you've never surfed before in your life. So you think about that and go, that doesn't make any sense. How could you do that? That's bigger than Godzilla, right? It's what happens when people are already at the top of their game, hear that somebody else has done something impossible and they start thinking about it. And the minute you start thinking about it, you fire up the brain's pattern recognition system. And very quickly that thinking leads to, well, what's it going to feel like when I do it? You end up sort of accidentally visualizing the impossible as possible for yourself. And since we know visualization has got a hundred year history of training up the brain's ability to do these kind of things. And there's a long process that involves flow and a lot of other stuff, but the end result is literally hearing that the impossible is possible makes it so much easier on a certain level. That seems to suggest the trick to pulling off this stuff is figuring out how to convince yourself in the first place that the impossible is possible for yourself.

And then to have the diligence and the patience to step back and realize that's not a snap your fingers, go for it tomorrow kind of thing. Right? The adrenaline of look, that's a sign to back off, not a sign to lean in. But when we have the maturity to say, look, I'm going to dedicate my life to pursuing this and I'M going to take it one baby step at a time. As you said, the impossible iteratively becomes possible and assisted to do the next day at work. Right?

Absolutely.

Yeah. That's great. What idea do you love that we have not discussed?

What idea do you I love that we have not discussed. Well, one of the things.

Yeah.

So since we want to make this the most useful for people, I want to talk about the back end of a flow state for a second. So we've talked about a four stage process. Struggles on the front end, couple other stages in the middle, with the third stage being flow. On the back end of flow, there is a recovery period. And this is something else that people get really, really wrong. Two things are important about the recovery period. First, we talked about those neurochemicals that show up in flow. Those turn out to be expensive for the brain to make and we have a limited supply and you need certain vitamins and minerals and sunshine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera to produce them. So you go from this enormous high of oh my God, I feel like Superman to a very deep low on the back end. You need some emotional fortitude, some grit to kind of go through that low again. It's a low that you can't treat like a low. And what's important about this is a couple of things. One, if you start getting stressed out about the fact that you no longer feel like Superman, you will start producing cortisol, it's a stress hormone. It blocks long term potentiation, it blocks learning. So you'll get the short term performance boost of flow, but you won't get the long term accelerated benefits of mastery. Right. It cuts you off from that stuff. The other thing is it's physically exhaustive to be in a flow state. It just takes a lot of energy. And if you're not recovering on the back end, you're not going to be able to start the cycle over again. How do you go from a recovery period where you're not recovering into the deep, deep fight that is struggle that comes next? Very, very tricky. And this is another thing we see kind of in the world today. Very, very frequently in business. Teams will come together, they'll generate amazing flow states, they'll pull off something fantastic. You see this in technology all the time in startups. And the minute they get through the other end, they've generated all this flow. They've done something amazing. They get through the other end and the boss says, oh, that's fantastic, that's great. Now do it again twice as Fast with half the resources, and there's no recovery period, and it's problematic. And I'll give you one final stat to sort of drive this home about. A lot of what we do here is we put sleep monitors on people. We make sure people are really getting eight hours of sleep a night. Because if you do put sleep monitors on most people, you find that most people get about 6.8 hours of sleep. And you need that extra couple of hours. And to drive this home, my favorite study that's been done on this, a baseball team that travels three time zones to play a game, with time zones being a measure of sleeplessness before the first pitch has been thrown out, they only have a 40% chance of winning.

Wow, this is so good. Amazing stat. And it's a really core part of my work. And what we do in these sessions is I love Jim Lore's phrase of making waves and actually training recovery. Right. And managing our energy. And the recovery phase needs to be trained as well as the kind of drive phase, right. In the flow state phase and then sleep. Just the other day I was talking to one of the leading procrastination experts, Tim Pischel, who said that driving, no, actually it was a multitasking thing. But this, the idea of driving sleep deprived is nearly as dangerous as driving drunk, right? So training, recovery, making waves, realizing that the flow state is expensive and you need to repay that. And that's just a natural part of the oscillating process. I like it.

It's a good formula.

It's a winning formula. Push hard and recovery equally hard. So can you give us a quick example of how you approach flow? So like something going on in your life and just how you've structured your life so we can bring it to life in the context of how you're showing up for sure.

So one of the most important things is obviously flow follows focus, right? You need uninterrupted concentration for flow. Schedule big periods of uninterrupted concentration. I get up every day at 4am I'm not saying everybody should get up at 4am, but I get up at 4am and from 4am till about 8:30 is when I do most of my writing. That's the bulk of my writing. Because writing demands flow. It demands focused. And nobody calls me at that period of time. I turn my phone off, I turn my email off, my cell phone's not even with me, that sort of thing. I actually have blackout curtains and kind of white noise filters. Everything I can to drive focus and help me Pay attention. So it sounds like such a simple thing, but uninterrupted periods of concentration, 90 minute blocks, if you can schedule them, are fantastic. And I think it's got to be the most important thing I do.

Right on. Can you tell us about the back end of that? Because I too get up super early and I go to bed super early. So what do you do the night before such that you can wake up at four feeling great?

Well, I go to bed early and there are, you know. So the most important thing I think is when I end my day, I end my work day. I want to start. I'm going to back you into this. Years ago I was reading an interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and he said something just absolutely brilliant. He said, I always stop writing at the time I'm most excited. And I thought to myself, well, that's ridiculous because the time you're most excited you've got your ideas are flow. Why would you stop then? What I realized is that usually by the time you notice that you're most excited, you've only. For me to just put it in writing terms. I've only got a couple paragraphs left in me. Those paragraphs are not worth trading the excitement for. I would rather wake up the next day fired up already. My brain's excited. I've already got some of that focus, some of that play energy. And I start by reading and editing the stuff I wrote the day before because it gets me fired up again. So by the time I'm facing the blank page, I've already got excitement in. The body is actually norepinephrine and dopamine. They're both focusing chemicals. They're both flow triggers. I try to end my day at the point I am most excited about what's coming the next day. I always make a list so I know and I don't have to wonder what is the order of my day. One of the things I discovered is that most professionals are pretty good at low grade flow states. We can focus. We know how to. If you're successful, you've learned how to focus. As a general rule, what trips people up is the transitions between tasks. So what I do is I have a list and I don't allow myself to get tripped up by the transitions. When I'm going from task to task, if I am not as focused as I want to be, I will stop. I'll do kind of mindfulness, breathing meditations, bring my focus back into the present. If that doesn't work, I will do five minutes of physical Exercise and then I will come back. And I've edited out the transition between things. I try to keep my focus crisp that way as well.

So good. It's so simultaneously genius and mundane.

Well, that's the problem with the flow stuff is that when you really look under the hood, ultimate human performance, because our neurobiology, when it plays out in the real world, it's not that complicated. Right.

These things are the consistent application of the obvious. Right. And I think it's the depth of maturity to see, look, I'm not going to get all this achieved in one night. And it makes no sense. For me, the biggest shift has been I stop my day digital sunset, sun goes down, I'm done, all electronics off, everything's done. And for exactly the reason you described. I know how good it feels to wake up feeling all those chemicals within me and just to crush it in the morning. And I've had a great day before the family wakes up. That's awesome. But I would do nothing to jeopardize that yet that took me forever to get to the awareness on and I think creating those boundaries, stopping when we're exciting, leaving some in the tank and honoring consistency over an artificial intensity that leads to snapping and burnout.

And you gotta, you know, I don't think everybody is as lucky as us in that they have schedules where they can get up super early and just do it that way. And if that's not the case, you need to have conversations with spouses and bosses and coworkers. They need to know what you're doing and why you're doing it. Most people get it. You're like, look, I'm going to be 500% more productive. Leave me alone for a few hours, right? This is what I'm doing right now. Have the conversations out loud. It sounds again, so simple. Makes a huge difference.

Yeah, that's awesome. And then create the time blocks. And then again, baby step it. We're not waving a magic wand here. And suddenly you're in one long four stage flow state all the time, right? It's the same iterative 4%, just get 4% better today. Compound that over a year, you're going to be way better. Give it a decade and let's see where you're at. It's going to be extraordinary, right?

I'll put it in really concrete terms. So for me with writing 350words is how much I can produce. No sweat under, you know, no toil conditions on any circumstances. I haven't slept for three days. I can still give you 350 good words, don't worry about it. 500 words, though that extra 150 words is what happens when an idea, an idea, a full idea, well expressed, takes about 350 words, I've discovered. You can go longer for sure, and turn it into a chapter or whatever, but that by the time you get to 500 words, if I'm moving the reader through what I'm talking about, I've linked a second idea together and that forces me to stretch. I have to write that transition. I have to make that connection. And on top of the fact that it makes me stretch and it makes me a little uncomfortable, or 600 words, say, I usually have to have some pattern recognition to bridge that gap. So by forcing myself to stretch, I'm also forcing myself to make a connection between ideas in an unusual way, which is going to kick more dopamine into my system and I can end up writing a thousand words, 2,000 words, but all I'm going for is 500 words.

Amazing. And then, for me, anyway, my life has become just putting myself in the state such that I can most gracefully and powerfully do that. Because if I don't sleep for, let alone three days, if I get six hours of sleep or even seven hours of sleep, I feel it. I'm.

So nobody's. No, I am. I totally agree. Nobody's worse than me at six hours of sleep. I can give you 350 good words, but I can't put together a coherent sentence out loud.

Yeah, well, this gives me goosebumps because this is it. This is the trick is I've realized that my work is actually not my work. My work is getting into a state such that I can just let it come through me while I'm working. Because I've aligned my life with simple things. It's, did I get a good night of sleep? Right. And that started with having the, as you said, grit and just simple self control to turn everything off at 5pm or whenever the sun goes down. The mundane, as David Allen says, is the pathway to the sublime. Right.

He's right.

This is good stuff. I love it. And obviously we can talk for a weekend about all these ideas. I like to kind of tie this all together by asking the same question, which is, if you could only give one piece of advice to someone passionate about optimizing their lives, what would that be? And it could be something we've already discussed or something outside of that. What would that one piece of advice be?

Well, I'm going to quote Scottish Philosopher Thomas Carlyle on This one, who 300 years ago said, no pressure, no diamonds. The thing about flow is it requires risk taking, right? Not a lot of it, but it requires risk. And that fail forward, fail faster. Silicon Valley motto certainly applies here.

No pressure, no diamonds. Awesome. I'm gonna go chew on that one. And all of us can look at it and kind of step back and see, well, what can we do? And I think my gut is it might be, might just be me projecting my own issues. But I think a lot of people who are into this stuff to self help and development tend to think we need to stretch too far. And I think that, that it's not that we're lazy and not trying to do too much, it's that we're trying to do too little. It's that we're trying to do too much. And that, that no pressure, no diamonds. But it's also no pressure over an elapsed period of time, right? And to have that discipline and maturity, to see that we can line this up over not days and weeks, but weeks and months and years and decades to create something that's truly a masterpiece. Steven, I appreciate you people can learn more about you. Where's the best place?

Stevencottler.com and the flowgenomeproject.org Stevencottler.com, which is.

S T E V E N K O T L E R and the Flow Genome Project. Great stuff, Steve. Thanks for taking so much time. And I look forward to featuring Bold and Abundance as well.

Brian, it was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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