Breaking the Burnout Cycle: Flow, Success Traps, and Creative Freedom with Joe Polish, Steven Kotler, Dan Sullivan, and more

What is the solution to burnout?

Flow is the opposite of burnout. There's really, really good data going a long way back. And if you're burned out, flow is probably what you're looking for. We tend to take, you know, top 25% of people and teach them how to be top 1%. Right? That's a lot of what we do. A lot of people come to us when they're burned out. And I found that the worst burnout that I've ever seen is with entrepreneurs who end up building a prison out of their own dreams. The worst possible situation you'd be in is when you've managed to. You're completely in and of yourself, you're on your purpose, you're doing everything right, and you've just turned your dreams into a prison. That's the hardest part.

Welcome to the Joe Polish show so far. If you've been listening to it, I hope you've been enjoying it. Today we're going to be diving into the incredible power of flow.

Attention.

A state of mind that can transform your happiness, performance and overall well being and also protect you from burnout. This episode features a powerful lineup. Steven Kotler, a world expert on flow and peak performance. Dan Sullivan, my dear friend, a legendary entrepreneurial coach, founder, strategic coach. We've been doing a podcast together since 2012. Simon Bowen, a master of simplifying complex ideas. And James Lawrence. You may know him as the Iron Cowboy. He has literally done consecutively 100 ironmans for 100 days straight in a row. Incredible. He shares his inspiring story of intentional suffering and resilience. And you'll learn why flow is essential for happiness and mental health. How creativity can shield you from burnout. And why measuring your progress the right way can completely change your outlook. Plus, you'll hear strategies for escaping success traps and solving complex problems with ease. And get ready for a conversation packed with insights, personal stories and practical tools that can take your life and business to the next level. And a lot of this was recorded during Genius network and our 100k group.

So you get a, you get an.

Inside look into the conversations that take place there. So here's today's episode of the Joe Paulist Show. Enjoy. And if you like it, please review it.

Well, you know, in Mapping Cloud nine, which is one of my favorite pieces of work you've ever done, I mean, you go through all the spiritual. It's just absolutely fascinating. What's your perspective on stepping into that place? Since, if you don't know, Stephen is now the world's Foremost expert on flow getting into a flow state. I mean, he was friends with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and he's done more work on it and has done so much research. And what's your perspective on, on performance? We're gonna, we're gonna have an interview later, which I know is gonna be badass, but anything you want to say to that, or you can hold it if you prefer.

I, I don't know how to come off of that. No, no, no offense. I tend to, whenever I look at religions, I tend to try to pull out the politics and pull out the kind of like common sense stuff.

But talk a little closer too, because.

I want to make sure I was interested in what are the state changing technologies underneath the religion. Whether or not you believe that God functions through the brain or the brain is on itself one way or another, things work through our biology. So I'm always interested in when I hear stuff like that. I'm like, okay, that's cool. Whether or not it's true. Open question. And I don't, I don't, I'm not that smart. I don't have any answers on the big why questions. But so I'm always like, okay, that's interesting. How does the biology work underneath that? So that's how I think about it. You asked a different question.

Oh, yeah, no, more so like, we spent a couple hours with Tommy Mello yesterday doing a podcast, which I was like brought into originally I thought I was just going to be the guy driving you there and. But it was a.

That job is open if you'd like it.

What's that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it was fascinating conversation, but like, what? Dan was just talking about Pompa, you know, tapping in. Like, I think so much of what we accomplish is just belief, you know, just the faith, however you want to interpret faith, however you want to interpret connection with God, whatever that means, you know, because essentially too, because, you know, I was raised Catholic, I had a lot of abuse in church. The word God was a really dark thing for me for a long time, because I had a lot of abuse bestowed upon me as a kid under the guise of God and caring. And it took me a long time to come to grips with it. And I also see all of the lessons. And so the point is, though, for a long time I could not believe in any sort of quote, unquote, God, even though I tried because I spent thousands of hours, it seems, of my life praying to something that I never felt, ever heard me or listened Right. It was very weird. And then when I got into recovery, addiction recovery, I see all these people that have transformed, many with beliefs that I can't even. That like to me sound like Santa Claus. Right. But I've been around it for so many years. When I see someone that actually believe that frickin cliche. If you believe the Henry Ford, if you believe you can or you believe you can't, you're right. There's just something about that that it just rings true in commitment. You know, taking something from caring about something versus being committed to it. So like yesterday when we were talking Stephen with Tommy about the, you know, dopamine, we had a lot of conversation about neurotransmitters and dopamine and things like that and the burnout like. So for instance, just speak real briefly to this one and then we'll go deeper into it. What is the solution to burnout that you have found through the lens of flow?

I'll just. Flow. Mental health is interesting. We've known flow has. Since Mihacszentmihalyi's work in the 60s, Flow has been well associated with happiness, overall life satisfaction, meaning and purpose. And most of what happened from when Mike did his early work to like 2010 or so was that got proved deeper and deeper and deeper. So when positive psychologists now define happiness, there's three tiers of happiness available. Flow is baked into the upper two tiers. So flow is now part of the actual definition of happiness. We know it underpins meeting, we know it underpins purpose, etc. Etc. What's happened in the past five years is the inverse. We always kind of knew if flow underpins mental health, it's got to kind of stave off mental health problems. But that's harder to prove and much more complicated. My lab a couple of years ago proved that flow overwrites ptsd. And then my friend Karina's lab proved that flow overwrites burnout. And then a big team out of Europe in a giant twin study, so 10,000 twins, gold standard study, we found last year, flow is neuroprotective against depression, anxiety, bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, stress related cardiac conditions. But the interesting thing is burnout. And so if you go back to Mihaly Csikszentmihal's very first book, which was Beyond Boredom and Beyond Boredom and Anxiety is what it's called, he actually blocked microflow. So flow is a spectrum experience. You can have microflow on one and that's a low grade flow state. You go to work, you start writing an email get so sucked into it, an hour goes by, I didn't know what happened. You ended up writing an asset. That's microflow. Macro flow is the opposite end of the spectrum. Until the 1950s, until Abraham Maslow came along, it was classified as a mystical experience, a spiritual experience, and it was only. Maslow did a giant study on success. And the commonality of everybody in his study group was they all found a way to use flow to amplify their performance. And it was a coincidence, but everybody in the study group was an atheist. Turned out random. But there were a couple hundred people in the study group, they were all atheists. And that was the first time spiritual experiences were out. And that was where the term peak experience came from. It was a non denominational way to talk about flow. Flow came later, but Csikszentmihalyi blocked microflow. And for three days he found a way to block microflow in people and then recorded what happened. And if you look at the symptoms of what happens when you block microflow, it's extreme burnout. It's the exact symptoms of extreme burnout. This is interesting in two ways. One, most of our companies in the modern world are designed to block microflow. That's essentially how they, what they do, right? So most companies are like, hi, welcome to my company, and here we're going to give you burnout with your new job. And you're going to have it. I mean, the funny thing about Mike's experiment is he did it for three days. And the symptom, it's extreme burnout. It's not like mild, it's really, really extreme. So when we say flow is the opposite of burnout, there's really, really good data going a long way back. And, and if you're burned out, flow is probably what you're looking for. How'd it do?

That was great. That was great. And by the way, you're gonna say something. And then we'll come to Simon, who has one of the most freaking unique skills of anyone I've ever met.

This has nothing to do with flow. So, and thinking about my thinking, one of the things I've realized over the last couple years is like, right now, every one of us is the sum of the stories we believe about our past and our future. And so going back and doing that work to like, as Dan would say, sort of reprocess your past into what can I learn from this instead of just the pain or whatever it did to me? And then my favorite Danism that I was going to talk to him about it at lunch. But now I'll do it publicly because I'm hoping to title my next book this. Dan said it during COVID I think he just sort of said it offhand, but I think it'll resonate with all of you. He said, creativity protects you. And when I was thinking through like, how am I going to survive? How am I going to feed my family? How am I going to do like. And I just realized, I know Joe, doing your story, you know, the trauma and things we see so many people who have been abused or like kids go into this hole of creativity. They create their own worlds, they create their own reality. And just that statement that creativity protects you is just so profound to me because there's so many places you can take it in life and business. So that's my favorite.

Danism.

Yeah.

Awesome.

You know, one thing, I thought more things, sure.

Not to go down to the religion and versus, you know, atheism path or anything like that. But, you know, I was brought up Catholic and all that and dances, you know, what happened when you were eight years old? I. I retired from Catholicism because I. It didn't serve me because I was trying to be somebody who I wasn't. Right. And I mean, you know, that's my interpretation now.

Right.

But. And I'll try to say this coherently, I. And then I don't have. I know. And I. I really believe in people who really believe and. And they come from a really deep spiritual place and they practice whatever the, you know, I'm deep connections with Jewish friends and Christian friends and, you know, all a lot of people. But I think that in a religion can cause people to think they have to live up to God's, you know, what they were born to be or what God created them to be or, you know, to get into heaven or whatever the level is that you buy into that. And so when you get into the creativity and Nick was talking about, you know, the creativity protects you and the flow stuff that Stephen was talking about, it could be that the. If you're trying to get somewhere or prove yourself to an outsider, sores, that's what creates the burnout. And if you're just really into your, you know, what you're trying to bring into being, that's more where it's flow and it feeds you and it feeds other people and stuff like that, if I'm saying it right. So, you know, could be that it may have been a coincidence that people who aren't weren't trying to, you Know, and there was the whole, like, what is it, Aristotle or something that had this perfect person that you were trying to become. And so by definition, everybody wasn't that. So you're in the gap all the time and, you know, focus on who you are, not who you're. Dan has this thing called there, here and there. And if you're trying to get there, you're always striving to get there. If you're just trying to really be here and then grow your here, you know, your perfect self here, and then just keep expanding it. You'll be at, you know, that whatever level. Yeah, eventually, sure. So.

You know, on the training side of my company, we tend to take, you know, top 25% people, teach them how to be top 1%. Right. That's a lot of what we do. And the worst burnout, a lot of people come to us when they're burned out. And I found that the worst burnout home that I've ever seen. That is really hard. And I'm not sure, I mean, flow can help, but I don't even know if I have the answers here at all. So it's an open question. Is with entrepreneurs who end up building a prison out of their own dreams, the worst possible situation you'd be in is when you've managed to. You're completely in and of yourself, you're on your purpose, you're doing everything right, and you've just turned your dreams into a prison. That's the hardest burn. Like, that's a really tricky situation to peel people back from because they've literally, like, it's your dreams. Right. And it's become a prison. So how do you think of that?

Yeah, I agree. Right. Success traps.

Yeah.

No, I was going to say me and Dan did a whole podcast on success traps are harder to get out of than failure traps.

Yeah, no, that's not what I was really talking. No, I was like, you know, like, be you and keep being you more and more. And, you know, and then you may have to, like, you know.

Yeah.

And be perceptive in yourself enough to know when it's not, you know, that's the identity. It's about money, then it's about kind of money or status or whatever that stops.

Well, there's many for, like. So for instance, we've got this guy over here who's very much lacking in ambition, I think. And this is James Lawrence, and he's the Iron Cowboy. And the latest thing he did was he did 100 consecutive Iron Mans. And he's going to be speaking a little bit later, and then we're going to do some Q and A with him. But you've been sitting here listening to all of this stuff and what's going through your head.

Hello, I'm James. In 1982, I was 6.

I like that.

As I've been listening, the thoughts have just been, I may be in the wrong room. I'm a serial introvert. My gift that I was given at birth is the gift to suffer. I questioned for a long time, man, that's the worst gift on the planet. Why couldn't I be a piano player? Or mindset goo. All these things. And then over my career of 20 years of suffering, I've just realized that the gift of suffering gives other people hope on their journey. Where I choose to suffer intentionally, there's. Most people are just internally suffering and battling and trying to figure out what they've been raised and taught. And that belief system often leads to that internal battle and suffering. And so you'll hear more than probably you want to hear this afternoon from our journey.

So.

Yeah.

Yeah. So stay tuned. And by the way, Nick. Nick did a movie.

Yeah. I was just gonna say that I'm the subject of Nick Nansen's recent Emmy nomination for our documentary that hopefully you guys will get to see tonight. I would highly recommend showing it.

Yeah, It's.

It's called Conquer 100.

Yeah.

And it's. Yeah. And I watch it because Nick sent me over a link. And it's.

It's great.

It's. And so depending on how the day plays out, we may, you know, optional, if you would like to watch the mov. Just play it, play it later. It's pretty. Pretty powerful.

Yes.

Dan.

The way that we approach it is that you're not your brain. You know, that your brain is a mechanism that's been created over hundreds of thousands of years. And there's one thing that the brain is really good at. It's really good at measurement. And basically, it's measuring, measuring, measuring, measuring. And the difference between unhappiness and happiness is a matter of measurement. And what are you measuring against? And so my sense, because I've dealt with entrepreneurs for the last 50 years, is entrepreneurs are real goal setters. They're always creating something in the future that they're not capable of doing right now. And then they grow. They make a commitment and they have courage, and then they create a new capability, and then they get confidence out of the new capability. So if you take two people, one of them sets a goal goes through the process and achieves the goal and then measures. And there's another one that does exactly the same thing. They set a goal, they go through the process, they grow and they get to here and they measure, but they measure differently. And one of them measures against an ideal which renders the answer that they haven't accomplished anything. And the other one measures backwards where they started and they've made progress and they feel really good. And that's the difference between unhappiness and happiness. One of the things that I got really interested in was teenage suicide. And it's very interesting when you go deep into teenage suicide, it's not the losers who commit suicide, it's the winners. Star quarterback, valedictorian, you know, the prom queen. And part of the reason is that they told what the rules of the game was and they mastered the rules of the game and they won. Except it didn't make them happy. And they're smart enough to know this is the way it's going to be for the next 60 years. And they check out. There was a goalie from the Stanford University soccer team and she was 22, she was a 4.0 student, and they won the national championship. She was an All American. And it was a month before graduation and she was in the cafeteria for the athletes and some male made a sexist comment to a friend of hers. And she walked over, she had a cup of hot coffee and she poured it in his lap. He got angry, he made a complaint to the administration and they sent a notice to her that probably the investigation into this was going to take two months and she wasn't going to be able to graduate on time. So she went back to the dorm and hanged herself. My sense is she wasn't living her life, she was living her parents life. And she just realized that she ruined her parents life, so she killed herself. So it's an ideal that you pick up, that this is who you're supposed to be. But there's. You can't measure properly because you're measuring against an ideal false identity. Yeah, well, everybody's got an identity. This one just doesn't do you any good.

That's right.

So that measurement, that constant measurement backwards is the real key. Because you have proof, you have witnesses, there's real measurements there. And even if you didn't get to where you want to go, you got somewhere that's better than where you were. And I think that's the basis for all happiness.

Yeah.

You know, so that, that's, that's one of the books you did with Ben hardy, who's joining 100k again. So he took a time off. He couldn't make this meeting, but he's going to join up again and he'll be at the annual event and called the gap in the game. And one of the things I'm going to take you all through later, got this from talking with Dean Jackson, is identifying the signature result. Like, what is the signature result that all of you. So I'll just plant that seed right now. Like, what's the signature result that you actually do in your business or your different businesses and different ventures? And I think one signature result and you can call it whatever you want. You already have names and patents for all this stuff. In terms of much of what you do at Coach is getting people out of the gap. It's giving them a way to look at their life and see how far they've come, not how far they haven't and how much that changes. Just everything about how you engage and interact with life versus when you want to check out. Yeah, very good. And you know, just because it came to my mind, then we'll come to you, Simon, and then we're going to take a break. When who was talking about money that said I'm rich? Was that you, Steve? Yeah, Steve. So your brother Naval, in the book that was compiled about him, the Almanac of Naval Ravikant, he talks about how he'll buy things and he, like, he'll just give it away or throw it away because, like to return it, his time is worth more than that. And do you operate that way? I mean, I didn't even know he did that.

Yeah, I did the same.

Yeah.

So I say because I'm too lazy, I just don't want to deal with returns.

Well, yeah, but yeah, the point is like going, okay, if your time is worth X and you're going to buy something from, let's say, Amazon and it's like, I don't know, 100 bucks. But it's like, how much time is it going to take you to return $100 item or even delegate it to an assistant? Return $100 item. It's like, I'm just going to give the 100 items someone. I'm just going to throw it away. Whatever. I'm curious of how.

Yeah, we both do the same.

Really.

For me, it's more like I don't.

Want to deal with the mental effort of returning it. That's the bigger cost for me.

Right, right, right.

Yeah.

I hate it.

That's why you need who's who, not how.

I've got a new business. I'm selling off their old stuff. It's fine.

You know what? Years ago, I wanted to, actually, but someone had taken the domain name because one of my sort of OCD things is every stupid idea I get, I register a domain name for it, right? So I end up with, like, thousands of them. But I wanted to get regift.com because I thought it was really good. Okay, sorry.

This may be a random thought about returning things. So lately, what's really, really been bothering me when I go into stores. Like, this morning, I went into. I forgot. I forgot all of my toiletries at. And so I went into CVS this morning, and I nearly died. I looked at the. Because I don't usually buy my own stuff, and I looked at the price like it was $9 for deodorant. And you think, well, what's the. The minimum wage, right? And you think, how the hell do people buy things? How the hell are people getting by? And I was just thinking, like, I. And I, you know, I bought a bunch of stuff this morning, actually, I bought the wrong stuff and I won't return it. But then I'm thinking, but I'd like to give it to someone who could use it, who can't afford to buy it. Like, I wonder how you do that.

I can repurpose you deodorant for you.

No, I got. No, I'm using the deodorant. Hands off. But I have some makeup if you'd like it.

Would you need some makeup?

No. But you know what, though? There is a. There is a model here of like. Yeah, because you're right, though. It's. It's. It's pretty bad.

I just felt so bad this morning. This morning I was like.

And.

And just so, you know, like, I mean, being From Canada, that $9 deodorant is actually, like. Right.

Like, you know, me and Cherie went to Malaysia, and then I spent a couple of days in Bang. And I was blown away at, like, how freaking inexpensive things are. It's. You know, it's been a long time. I mean, last time I really thought about it was when I was in Vietnam. Just the price differential. But, like, we went to Bangkok, and I was with Ken Rutkowski and his partner Sandy, and me and Sandy go and get a freaking amazing, like, unbelievable reflexology massage. $6 US for an hour. And the person wouldn't take a tip. Expect no tip. And the other thing is, like, we have this American Express concierge service. And so we're flying. Where do we fly? Back on.

Singapore.

Singapore, not Emirates. That was on the way up. So they had our phone number messed up for the person to come to the airport. And we had gotten there around 12:15, and she had said, I tried sending you a message. Did you get? I go, no. And I go, what number do you have? And they had the wrong phone number, which we had tried to correct the first time. This woman had been standing there since 10am she'd been there for two hours and 15 minutes just waiting for us. And I saw her phone. It had 10% battery left. And she was like the nicest person. And I just felt so bad. And I was like, you know, I go to give her. I was like, I gotta give her a tip. Because she's like, they don't expect tips here. And she just, literally, she's like, no, I'm just doing my job. I'm just doing my job. And what I found is, like, there was no tips expected anywhere. And the service was like, probably on a factor of like, five times better than America. It was the weirdest thing. And. But how cheap it was and the, like, unbelievable meals at Michelin star restaurants. Like, 20, 20 bucks for, like, two or three people. It's like, crazy. I was like, wow. Like, so Simon has all the. So here's. Here's the cool thing. Simon came to 100k as a speaker last year, gave him incredible presentation. We went to the Grand Canyon. First time you went to the Grand Canyon, that was kind of cool. Took my sprinter van up there, which the sprinter van's in the back because that was our backup starlink Internet, since we couldn't get Internet here. And so Simon is the only person I've ever met that literally creates models showing you how to present, package, sell, educate, communicate what it is that you do. And he's. You know, him and his wife came from. How long have you been in the States now?

This trip?

Yeah.

Like, four days.

Four days.

Did you get in a fight too, with your eye? Did someone.

That's another whole other story.

Okay, we're gonna tell that. So tell everyone, like, what you do and how you do it, because those of you that have any sort of difficulty communicating your unique skill and abilities, Simon has one of the best ways I've ever seen to present and sell. And he's taught many people how to make millions of dollars with his methodology.

Thanks, Joe. So, like, Dan, I, you know, farm boy in Ohio, I grew up in towns in Country, Western Australia, with like four and 900 people. And the reality of that is people are very practical, very pragmatic, right? And so I kind of realized from a really early age that conflict and chaos are breeds inside complexity. And the reason for that is as soon as you step into a complex conversation like the one we've just been having without, you know, the risk of offending everybody, everybody is just expressing their opinion. And you need two things to have an opinion and hold onto it. You need fact to inform the opinion and then you need ignorance to hold onto it in the face of all other evidence. So, you know, believe the world is flat by ignoring all other evidence to the contrary. And so, you know, often our human conversations around complex issues are opinion interspersed with sporadic evidence. And so the government in west in Australia and large companies, mining companies and everything else started to hire me to facilitate complex, contentious conversations. So the government would say, we've got 200 people who are at war with each other over an issue. You've got two hours to get them to agree. And I can do that. You know, I can. We're going to build a $1.4 billion sports stadium. We want to find out what everybody wants. Someone's got to write the brief for the architects to tender against. So we build a stadium that the community wants. And I can do that. You know, an Australian company building ferries wants to start building ships for the U.S. navy. So I can build them a visual model that you can explain in about 10 minutes, which shows how you build and sustain warships in battle. And when the most senior person in a procurement team says, how come no one else has explained it that simply for us before, that's the moment you win multi billion dollar deals. And what's really going on inside of this is I was looking for the system for thinking and influence. Seldom do we think from a blank space. All of us are thinking from a perspective. And so in this whole conversation we were just having, if you imagine a visual model actually sitting in the middle of the room, we would have all been speaking from outside of the visual model and you wouldn't get through the model to the other side, if that makes sense. And so the conflict is trapped inside the model. So I just kind of learned to start to hear conversations in models. I'm black down. I'm sort of obsessed with thinking and deeper thinking and I want to find the middle of the model. So when I'm looking at complexity, I'm trying to find. This might sound weird, but I'm trying to find the Geometry of the complexity. First, I don't care about the words. I don't even care about the concepts. I want to find the geometry of the complexity, and then I want to go right to the middle of the geometry and then figure out how to work out from that. Then we can find the concepts to put into it. And then this thing we invented, study stage magic and comedy, creating the choreography. We have a walk through that. So models became this system for thinking and influence, to elevate thinking and accelerate influence. And so when you start to draw, so we teach people to draw rather than use PowerPoint. Humans are still analog, living in a digital world, and when you draw things that are drawn by hands, people kind of get drawn into them. So we kind of capture this complexity, and we put them into visual models that, once seen, can't be unseen. And what you're actually forcing people to do. If the model was sitting in the middle of this room for that whole conversation that we just had, everyone knows it's the other side of the model we've actually got to look at. And once it's seen, it can't be unseen. And so over the last, our tools that we make are visual models. So over the last, I don't know, two years, I've built about 700 models. I read a business book, and the model pops into my head, and I summarize entire business books into a model. We work with companies to capture their core genius. I built this flagship model called the genius model. We can capture the entire genius of a company in a single model. That takes seven to ten minutes to explain. And because we're analogs, humans are analogs. We need to see things. We want to draw stuff. And, you know, we bury too much. Entrepreneurs, I think, lose their identity inside the complexity of what they've built. And when that happens, you start chasing complexity rather than the cause, if you like. And if we can simplify, not dumb down, but actually simplify. And everything shifts. Everything absolutely shifts. But, you know, I hear conversations and models are popping in my head. It's just how my brain works, you know?

You know, thank God some people have other things pop into their heads. But no, it's. It's all good. Don't miss another episode of the Joe Paulist Show. Subscribe today at the joe paulish show.com if you'd like access to the show Notes to take action on what was discussed, please visit thejopaulishow.com 5.