The Art of Impossible: Be Your Best With FLOW When It Matters Most with Steven Kotler - Genius Network Episode #199

Primary flow activity is the thing. For me, it's skiing, right? I've been doing it since I was five. 90% of the time I go skiing, it just drops me into flow. I love it. That's my primary flow activity. My secondary flow activity is writing, right? It's 60 to 70% of the time I get into flow. Funny thing about flow is it's essentially a focusing skill. So the more flow you get, the more flow you get. So if you get a lot of flow dancing or writing or painting or whatever, actually spending time in flow doing the thing you love, going back to work, you're gonna end up with more flow in your work. Life and anamanieros peak performers, we don't often we forget that we don't do the things that we kind of did as kids that were really, really flowy as we get busier as we get families, et cetera, et cetera. And that's the only other thing I wanted to add in, like remember to go back, go back to that one. Even if it's just a little bit, 20 minutes a day, that flowy joy for life. Neurochemically, it's really important. And it's the thing that always during times of crisis and as we get busier as professionals, that's the shit that always goes out the window. And there are really good neurobiological reasons that you shouldn't do that.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event, or want to learn more about Genius network, go to www.gienstruitnetwork.com. it is with my pleasure that I introduce Steven Kotler. He's a New York Times best selling author and award winning journalist and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He's one of the world's leading experts on human performance. The author of 11 books including the Future is Faster Than youn Think. He also wrote Stealing Fire, Bold and Abundance, which he did with Peter and the Rise of Superman. I've got several interviews with him, all on my different podcasts with some of his books. His work's been nominated for two Pulitzer prizes, been translated into over 40 languages, and has appeared in over 100 publications including the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Time, Wired and Forbes. He's also the co founder of Rancho de Chihuahua Dog Sanctuary. The guy's brilliant and I'm so looking forward to him presenting the latest research he has on flow and anything else that he's going to talk about. Because with what we're going on in the world right now, I think it's going to be absolutely essential and very useful for all of you. So, Stephen, take it away.

Thanks, Joe. Hey, everybody. It's good to be with you. I saw some familiar faces among the members. It's nice to see you, Chris. Hope you're holding up well. And so for those of you who are not totally familiar with my work and what I do, as Joe said, I'm author, I'm a journalist, and I'm the executive director, the Flow Research Collective. And what we do at the Flow Research Collective, we're research and a training organization. On the research side, we have partnerships with everybody from kind of usc, ucla, Deloitte, Formula One, Imperial College London, Stanford, a couple other organizations, and we study the science of peak human performance, focusing primarily on the state of consciousness known as flow. We'll talk about more of that in second. And on the training side, we essentially take all the science that we learn on the research side and use it to train everybody from kind of the US Special Forces, Navy Seals and such, through CEOs at companies like Google or Accenture, to tens of thousands of people in the general public. And what our focus is always on sort of the same thing. What does it take to be your best when it matters most? What does it take for individuals, for organizations, sometimes even institutions to level up their game like never before? Our interest is really helping kind of drive paradigm shifting. Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs and kind of, in a phrase, if you can get past the hyperbole and understand that I mean this in a very practical way, focus on is what does it take to do the impossible? That's at the center of all the work I do. And essentially this question of what does it take to do the impossible has been at the center of my research for the past 30 years. I've taken this question into every domain imaginable. In the Rise of Superman, I looked at action and adventure sport athletes who were pushing the upper limits of human performance farther and faster than ever before. In Tomorrowland, that was an investigation into those maverick innovators who turned science fiction ideas into science fact technologies did the impossible of dreaming up the future in bold, as Joe said. I teamed up with Peter and we looked at entrepreneurs like Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson, folks who had built impossible businesses in near record times and often in domains where people didn't even think you could build businesses and then in abundance. Also with Peter, we looked at individuals and small teams sort of tackling grand global challenges, challenges that 20 years earlier were the sole problems of large corporations and big governments, and now individuals were going after them. This is poverty, energy scarcity, water scarcity. Individuals were having more luck and more success than a lot of the big governments that came before. And in all this work, it turns out it doesn't actually matter what domain you investigate. Whenever you see the impossible become possible, whenever you see significant leaps in human performance, you are seeing a state of consciousness known to researchers as flow. Scientists define flow as an optimal state of consciousness. It is a state of consciousness that when we feel our best and we perform our best. You may know flow by a lot of other names. You may call it being in the zone or runner's high or being in the pocket. If you play basketball, sometimes it's being unconscious. Standup comics call it the peak experience is what Abraham Maslow called it. The lingo is sort of endless. And the term describes whatever the terminology describes, those moments of rapt attention and total absorption when you get so focused on what you're doing, so focused on the task at hand, that everything else just seems to disappear. Your sense of self, your sense of self, consciousness, that will go away, time will dilate, which is a fancy way of saying it passes strangely, sometimes it will slow down. You'll get a freeze frame effect. Made a car crash more frequently, the experience we've had much more often. You get so focused on what you're doing that five hours go by just like that in five seconds. Right? And throughout, all throughout this experience, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. Now, flow science itself is actually kind of old. It dates back to the late 1870s. Some of the earliest work done kind of in field that became cognitive neuroscience, fields that became cognitive psychology were done on flow. So the research itself is quite old. It got a giant boost in the 1970s and 80s because of this man. This is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He's often talked about as the godfather of flow psychology. He was the chairman of the University of Chicago psychology department. And Csikszentmihalyi is essentially the man who coined the term flow. We'll talk about why in a second and put flow science on the map. And I want to talk a little bit about what Csikszentmihalyi discovered because it's very useful. So one of the things we discovered is that flow states are definable. They have core psychological characteristics. You're looking at them. This is complete concentration on a limited field of attention. Merger of action, awareness, loss of self and self consciousness, time dilation, there's a sense of control, as if you control forces you don't normally control. And an autotelic experience, which is another fancy way of saying the experience is so fun, so enjoyable, so pleasant, pleasurable, so rewarding, so meaningful, we will do it for the sake of doing it. We're automatically motivated to do it. These core characteristics. When psychologists talk about flow, they're talking about the presence of these core characteristics. When psychologists measure flow, what they're measuring is the amount that these characteristics are showing up during a given experience. We're going to talk about the neuroscience, what's going on in the brain underneath all this stuff a little bit later. But, but psychologists define it this way. And it's because of Csikszentmihalyi that we do. And because he figured out that flow is definable. We also figured out that flow is measurable. As I mentioned, there are about five or six different extremely well validated psychometric instruments that measure these characteristics and can let you know if we're in flow or not. What we don't yet have is a biophysical flow detector. So that can look at the brain and the body and say, oh, yes, you're in a flow state. My organization, the Flow Research Collective, is working very hard to build one. A couple other organizations are as well. And I think we're really sort of on the cusp of that. Next three to five years, we're actually going to see that in the world. Except me. I also discovered, and this is critical, that flow is a universal. It is essentially how evolution shaped the human brain. For peak performance. Flow shows up in anyone, anywhere, provided certain initial conditions are met and everybody listening to me talk right now can get into flow. We are all biologically hardwired for this experience. Also critical. And what I figured out is that flow is a spectrum experience. So you can have a micro flow state. This is where some of those core characteristics show up, or all six of them show up, but they're dialed really slowly. So an experience of microflow is you're at work, you sit down for a quickie email, you look up an hour later and you've sort of written an essay. You didn't notice time passing, and maybe your sense of self didn't disappear, but you had to go to the bathroom really badly and you totally, you didn't notice until you pop back into consciousness. You're like, oh, wow, I got to go to the bathroom. Right? Self didn't vanish, but some bodily awareness did a little bit that's a micro flow state. Macro flow is the opposite end of the spectrum. It's when all the flow's core characteristics show up and they're just turned up to 11. And this is a very powerful, powerful, powerful experience. In fact, so powerful that until the 1950s or so, when people were looking at macro flow, they thought they were looking at so called mystical experiences. And it was only in the 50s that we started to realize that this had nothing to do with spiritual practices or religious practices or anything else like that. And that it was sort of available to everybody. So macro flow is when time slows down self energy. Sometimes you can feel like you're one with everything, right? Surfers get the feeling they become one with when they're in flow states. Writers, I can be in a deep flow state as a writer and I can just disappear into the work and become one with the work. That's fairly common at the macro flow level. Csikszentmihalyi also figured out why flow is flowy. So what happened and where the term comes from is Csikszentmihalyi was going around the world studying kind of optimal performance. Everybody basically running around the world talking to anybody could possibly talk about the times in their life where they felt their best and they performed their best. And he talked to everybody. Started out talking to experts, stockbrokers, neuroscientists, dancers, rock climbers. And then he went on to talking to like Italian grape farmers and Navajo sheep herders in Detroit, assembly line work workers, everybody else. And it didn't matter who we talked to, every said the same thing. They said, God, you know, when I'm performing at my best, I'm in this state of consciousness, this altered state of consciousness, where every decision, every action flows seamlessly, perfectly, effortlessly from the last. So flow is actually, to use the technical term, a phenomenological description of the state. It's how the state makes us feel. Flow feels flowy. And what's interesting is underneath that feeling, you get a first look at sort of what is actually going on under the hood action. Every decision to flow seamlessly, perfectly, effortlessly from the last flow has to be a state of near perfect high speed decision making. An important safety tip there. I said near perfect, not perfect. The extreme skier Scott Schmidt once said, flow makes me feel like Superman. Up until the moment I'm not so good to remember that not every decision in a flow state, even though they all feel brilliant, they're not always brilliant. And finally, the last thing Csikszentmihalyi determined is that Flow is fundamental. It is fundamental to overall well being, meaning, purpose, happiness. In fact, in his work we learned that the people who score off the charts for things like overall life satisfaction and well being are the people who have the most flow in their lives. More recently, psychologists now define three levels of happiness. On this planet. There are three levels of happiness we can actually achieve. There's the first level, which is how do you feel right now? It's moment by moment happiness. And it is mostly determined by nature and nurture. There's not a whole lot you can do here. As Dan Harris famously pointed out, you can get 5 to 10% happier if you sort of play at this level. Techniques for that, mindfulness meditation, gratitude, practices, those sorts of things. But they're not real big step functions. If you want to sort of step up to the next level, they call that enjoyment. And that is literally nothing more than a high flow lifestyle. This means, this could mean that the thing you do for work, for example, I'm a writer. That's very flowy. For me, that's a high flow lifestyle because it also mean that you work construction during the summer because you ski all winter and skiing is really flowy for you. That could be a high flow lifestyle as well. That's enjoyment or engagement. The highest level of happiness available to anybody on the planet is what's known as meaning. And this is literally a high flow lifestyle where the thing that is producing flow is attached to a purpose that is greater than yourself. Right. If my writing is trying to heal the world, that's a high flow style lifestyle attached to a purpose, and that actually produces the most meaning. Life satisfaction and well being, you can kind of achieve beyond that. Once Csikszentmi High did his foundational work on those six things, the next question researchers turned their attention to is, okay, if we're talking about optimal performance, how optimal? What are we actually talking about? And so this is a quick look. A lot of this research was done by a lot of different organizations. We'll talk about why these numbers are so big a little bit later when we get into the science of flow. But we know that motivation and productivity can increase in some studies as high as 500%. And that 500% number actually comes from a student done by McKinsey on top executives and found the top executives in flow reported being 500% more productive than out of flow. It's a really big number. It's a very sexy number. It seems to be accurate. We've been taking another, we've been working on A flow and business study with Deloitte. We're wrapping it up now and we're going to try to drill down deeper into that number and exactly sort of figure out what is getting amplified, but it's a pretty big jump. Learning and memory, this is work done that was done by the US Department of Defense, found that soldiers in flow will learn 250%, 240% faster than normal. And other work has shown that you can take the time. If you take a novice, somebody who's an absolute novice, simply put them into flow and train them up to the expert level. And they've done this in a number of different domains. In flow, it can take about 50% less time. So you see a huge spike in learning and memory. Creativity and innovation can go up 400 to 700%. This is work that we did at the Flow Research Collective, was done a little bit at usc, some of it at the University of Sydney, and a little bit of a Harvard. Meaning and purpose, as I just talked about skyrockets, we don't have good numbers for this, but we know that communication, collaboration, cooperation go through the roof. And we also see an expansion of empathy and ecological awareness. There are. This sounds like a motley crew of reason of things that, for one thing to amplify. There are actually reasons for this, biological reasons. I'm not going to go into that now, but there are. It's not just like this motley assortment of skills. They're mostly all the skills we need to innovate and be creative and sort of solve problems that way. One of the problems that we have in the modern world is we have local and linear brains. And what we mean by that, if you're not familiar with the work that Peter and I have done together, is our brains evolved in environments that were local, meaning everything we dealt with was roughly a day to two days walk away from us. And linear, meaning the rate of change was really slow. So the difference between your great grandparents life and their great grandchildren's life were very, very little change. Right. The different. There were 25 years that went between the invention of fire and the invention of the wheel. Very slow rates of change. This is what the brain evolved. Of course, the problem is that we live in a global and an exponential world. And the brain can literally not deal with, with this speed of change and the scale of change, it did not evolve to handle either of these things. And that is massively, massively problematic. Right. And exponential. For those of you guys who are not familiar with the term exponential Growth is very different from linear growth. Linear growth is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. That's what the brain can process. Exponential growth is a doubling. 2 becomes 4 becomes 8. Most people had a really difficult time grasping exponential growth until we came up against Covid. And now suddenly people are like, oh, wow, that's what exponential change looks like. A virus grows exponentially. That's what it looks like. The new book that Peter and I have written, the future is faster than you think, talks about 12 different technologies that are now advancing on exponential growth curves, and they're starting to collide. And when you have exponential technologies like computers that double in power on a regular basis, or nanotechnology or biotechnology, when they start converging and bashing into that, we're seeing robotics and AI bash into each other. As a classic example from right now, you get a whole is much greater than the sum of its parts effect. And so the scale of change goes up and up and up. The brain cannot process this speed or this scale, which means when most of us are trying to kind of think around the world we're in today, Covid or not, we're not equipped to do it. Flow is the only time our brain actually can process at speed and at scale. In fact, there's a part of your brain that shuts off normally when you try to project into the future. And flow, it gets hyperactive, which is why we tend to have deeper insights in flow. You sort of see farther in the future. So there's great advantages with flow in dealing with a world of exponential change. Once we sort of figured out, oh, okay, this is what flow we mean by optimal performance, we got it. The next question was, where the hell is it coming from? Where is flow coming from? And here we got a really big boost from neuroscience. Neuroscience has been accelerating, especially brain imaging technology, on exponential growth curves fairly recently. So over the past 10 to 15 years, we have been able to look under the hood of flow to sort of figure out where it's coming from, why it's coming. And you're actually looking in these slides at one example of this. So this is me taking part in an experiment that was designed by Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman. I've been hoisted 150ft into the air, and I'm being dropped into a circus net. And that thing on my wrist that I'm trying to look at as I'm falling is what's known as a perceptual chronometer. And we're trying to figure Out. Why does time pass so strangely in flow? We made a lot of progress on that, and I'll talk about that in a little bit. We'll also say that this particular experiment, about six months until I could walk right afterwards a little bit for this information. I just want you to know that. So what did we learn in this research? It's really neat. Sort of turns our old ideas about high performance upside down. The old idea you guys are familiar with, it's technically called the 10% brain myth. And it's this idea that we're only using a small portion of our brain, say 10% at any one time. So ultimate performance, aka flow, must be the full brain on overdrive. And it turns out we actually had it exactly back in flow. We're not using more of the brain, a lot less of the brain. Technical term for this is transient hypofrontality. Transient means temporary hypofrontality. Hypo. Hypo, the opposite of hyper means to slow down, to shut down, to deactivate and frontality. It's the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that's right back there. Really powerful portion of the brain, long term planning higher cognitive functions, your sense of morality, your sense of willpower. In flow, this portion of the brain shuts down. And this has a huge impact on performance. Why does time pass strangely in flow? Time, it turns out, is a calculation performed all over the prefrontal cortex. And when it turns out, turns off, it's like a network. And as parts of the network go off, the whole network collapses and we lose our ability to separate past from present from future, and we're plunged into the state that researchers talk about as the deep Now. It is incredibly joyous, it is incredibly fun. And the reason is, most of our fears and our anxieties are either scary things that happened in the past that you steer around in the present, or they're scary things that might happen in the future. And if I remove past and future, anxiety levels plummet. In fact, as we move into flow, you see stress hormones get flushed out of our system. As a result, same thing actually happens to our sense of self. Your sense of self is a calculation performed all over your prefrontal cortex. Parts of it wink out. Our self disappears. This is also what happens to your inner critic in flow. That nagging, always on defeat, his voice in your head. For the older folks in the room, this is your iter, Woody Allen, right? In flow, Woody gets really, really quiet, silent. The inner critic turns off. So what do we see another huge spike in performance. First of all, we experience this as like liberation, as freedom and joy and happiness for a lot of reasons we'll get to in a second. What we're literally doing is getting out of our own way. But we see risk taking go up, we see creativity skyrocket because you're no longer doubting every one of your ideas. Besides these changes in kind of neural anatomical function, there's a bunch of other things that happen in the brain. We're not going to talk about all of them. Just want to talk about. One other thing that happens is we see a big shift in neurochemistry. Neurochemicals are signaling molecules, meaning when the brain wants to talk to itself or talk to the body, it sends out neurochemicals. That's how it one of the ways it communicates in flow. You get five of the most potent neurochemicals the brain can produce, and flow appears to be the only time we get all five of these chemicals at once. Now, these are all the lists on the bottom. Norepinephrine, dopamine, endorphins, nandamine, serotonin, and sometimes, by the way, oxytocin. These are all performance enhancing chemicals. They will amplify body function. So when they're in our system, strength increases, pain, our sense of pain decreases. Fast twitch muscle responses go up. But their bigger impact is cognitive. You want to understand why flow shows up whenever we see the impossible become impossible? It's because of flow's impact. And those neurochemicals impact on the three sides of what's called the high performance triangle. Motivation, learning and creativity. The reason it's called the high performance triangle is when they look at the 21st century and they say, what are the skills we most need to thrive in the 21st century? It's always motivation, learning and creativity. They sort of top everybody's list. All five of those chemicals, besides being performance enhancers, they're pleasure drugs. They're the five most potent pleasure drugs the brain can. We're all at this point really familiar with dopamine because our devices, we're addicted to our devices. That's a dopamine addiction, right? If you combine dopamine and norepinephrine, by the way, that's the cocktail that underpins romantic love, right? Most people will say falling in love is one of the best feelings ever. That feeling is norepinephrine and dopamine. Flow is that feeling, plus three other pleasure chemicals. When McKinsey finds top executives 500% more productive in flow, that huge spike in motion. It's because there's addictive pleasure chemistry underneath it. That's when psychologists talk about flow as autotelic or the source code of intrinsic motivation. It's this pleasure chemistry. That's why see something else similar happen to learning quick shorthand. How does learning and memory work in the brain? Why is there such a big boost in learning and memory and flow? The more neurochemicals that show up during experience, better chance it's going to move from short harm holding into long term storage. It's what these neurochemicals do. They tag experience, very important, save for later. So you get a big dump of neurochemicals during flow. You get a huge increase in learning and memory. Creativity, fanciness aside, is always. And by the way, when we talk about creativity, the technical definition of creativity is nothing more than the creation of novel ideas that are useful. So that's what we're talking about here, right? We're talking about the starting point for innovation. We're talking about problem solving, decision making, etc. And creativity is always recommendatory. It's what happens when the brain notices something novel and interesting in the external environment, or maybe in the internal environment, like cool thought, combines it with an older idea that we've had and uses the results to create something startling new. All the neurochemicals that show up and flow essentially surround the creative process. So when we're in the state, we take in more information per second. So data acquisition goes up, we pay more attention to that information. So salience increases, we find faster connections between that incoming information and older ideas. So what's known as pattern recognition spikes, we find faster and farther flung connections between ideas. So what's known as outside the box thinking or lateral thinking increases. And finally on the back end of creativity, because it's not just enough to have a neat cool idea, you also have to take it public. It's got to be useful. There's risk there, right? So we see risk taking spike as well. This is why creativity spikes 400 to 700% inflow. It's because these neurochemicals surround the creative process. There's coming from. This is the complete neurophysiological picture of flow, where we are right now. These are all the different things that go on in the brain and the body. A lot of these things need more work on them. This isn't 100%, but this is where the field is right now. So we know everything from kind of what happens to your brain, all the Way down to at the very bottom in flow, we have a hard time frowning and we have a really easy time smiling. So our frowning muscles seem to be a little paralyzed down here, and our smiling muscles seem to be a little amped up. So we're getting really good at being able to measure flow down to, like, what is your face doing when you're in this state? Here's the coolest news. This is what matters to everybody. Now that we've done all that background is. And this is a lot of the work that my organization helps spearhead. Once we figured out what flow is, is creating flow in the brain, we ask the next question. Well, how do we get more of it? And what we've discovered is that flow states have triggers. These are preconditions that lead to more flow. So if you want more flow in your life as an individual, if you want more floor in your organizations as leaders, these triggers are your toolkit. And there are 22 in total. There are 12 individual triggers, and then there are 10 group triggers. So the group triggers, there's a shared version of flow. It's known as group flow. This is a team performing at their best. It's a fantastic brainstorming session where the ideas are just flying around the room. Or it's a fourth quarter comeback in sports. Or have you ever seen a live concert? The band just sort of pulls together and the music just soars. That's group flow in action. And then there are triggers for group flow as well. And I want to give you a little bit of a look of what's going on under the hood, because I'm a science guy. And when we talk about flow triggers, flow follows. Focus only shows up when all of our attention is in the right here, right now. So that's what all the triggers do. And they do it one of three ways. They either drive norepinephrine and dopamine, two chemicals we've been talking about that do lots of different things in the brain, but they increase focus and excitement. Right? Norepinephrine and dopamine are. The cocktail we talked about is romantic love. Think about when you're with somebody you love and you can't stop paying attention to them. It happens naturally. You don't have to work to focus on the person you're in love with. It happens automatically because you're so excited to be with them. And, oh, my God, that's what happens in flow. That same neurochemistry, or the triggers will decrease cognitive load, cognitive loads, all the crap you're trying to think about in any one time. And if I lower cognitive load, I free up extra energy and you can repurpose that and use that for focus in the presence. That's what the triggers do under the hood. And I also want to tell you that they are remarkably easy to work with. So my previous company, before the Flow Research Collective, we did a six week joint learning exercise at Google. And we went into Google and we took about 80 Googlers from all over the company, meaning sales, marketing, coding, management, didn't matter. And we trained them up in the use of four flow triggers over a six week period, give them about an hour's worth of homework a day. And what we saw in the back end was a 35 to 80% increase. Just to put that in perspective, this is more McKinsey's work. But they discovered that we spent about 5% of our professional work lives in flow, often in microflow, usually without even noticing it. And if we could crank that up to 15 to 20% of our time in work and flow, McKinsey calculated that overall workplace productivity would double. So this is a really big increase. And it's because all we're doing, and if anybody tells you anything different about peak performance, they're absolutely lying. The only thing we can mean by peak performance is getting your biology to work for you rather than against you. That's all we're doing at the Flow Research Collective. That's all you can really do in peak performance is you're designed to work a specific way. And when you do it, this is what happens. It's not that these numbers are huge, it's that this is how the system is built to work. And I want to talk a little bit about, I want to make a couple recommendations here. I want to talk about a couple of triggers and how to apply them in your life. And the first one I want to start with is the most obvious, which is complete concentration. When we work with organizations, the very first thing I do is I walk in and I say, look, you can't hang a sign any door. This is fuck off, I'm flowing. You cannot do this work at all. Flow demands uninterrupted concentration. And that means you got to have your conversations ahead of time, right? You got to talk to your bosses, you got to talk to siblings, you got to talk to your wives and your partners and your kids. And you got to let them know about the importance of uninterrupted concentration. Now what do I mean by uninterrupted concentration? There are good Ways to do this one. There is research going back to the 1950s that we evolve to work in 90 to 110 minute cycles. This is, by the way, constant. This is why REM cycles of sleep are 90 minutes to 110 minutes. We evolved to focus for these specific amounts of time. And the research consistently shows if you want to maximize flow, the best thing you could possibly do is we tell people to start their day with your hardest, most challenging, most important task and devote 90 to 120 minutes uninterrupted concentration to this task. I know I'm going to get pushback from people who are managers who like to say, oh no, I got to talk to people. That's my job. You know what, I've done this for 30 years. At this point, I can tell you that the best managers out there will tell you that they will spend that 90 minutes figuring out what they're going to do in all their conversations throughout the day and strategizing much. And we'll get way more done in those conversations. Conversations, 90 to 120 minutes, uninterrupted concentration. And when we talk about uninterrupted concentration, we're also talking about task orientation, not ego orientation. There's a fancy way of saying focus on the thing you're trying to do. Don't focus on how you think it's going to be received in the world. So for me as a writer, if I'm writing, I can't, I got to be focused on the words. I can't be focused on, oh, how's my reader going to feel about me later? And the reason is when you start asking those, how are they going to think about me? Ego kinds of questions, you start involving your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that has to turn off and flow, it gets back involved. Autonomy actually matters. Also, it turns out autonomy and attention are coupled systems. So if you don't feel like you're free, I am focused on this thing that I'm looking at out of my own volition, my own choice, because I desire to be here. You can't actually put all your attention on the thing that you're trying to pay attention to. And finally, before you go into your 90, 100 minute period of uninterrupted concentration, practice, distraction management. I do it at the end of my day, so I will end my day the day before I turn off everything that I don't want on in the morning. So Twitter, Facebook messages, phone gets turned off, everything gets turned off ahead of time. So When I walk into my office in the morning, the only thing I'm the thing that I want to pay attention to. So it seems like such a simple thing. For a lot of us, it tends to be a little hard. And most people are like, wow, that's a lot of time. So 90 minutes of complete concentration is the first thing. The second thing I want to talk about second trigger. We're going to go into, and then I'll get out and take your questions. We can go wherever. This is what's known as the challenge skills balance. And it's often called the golden rule of flow. And it's the idea that flow follows focus. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch but not snap. If I were to talk about emotionally, I'd say flow sits not on, but very near the midpoint between boredom and anxiety. There's not enough stimulation here. I'm just not paying attention. Anxiety, Whoa. Way too much in between is what researchers the flow channel. Now, the flow channel is a little tricky. Essentially, if you're a little shy or you're a little micro, you're a little quieter. It's going to be troubling because flow sits slightly outside your comfort zone. Right? You want to stretch. You want to be really pushing on your skills to the utmost, but you don't want to overwhelm yourself. The flip side is that for real peak performance. And a lot of entrepreneurs in this group, and entrepreneurs really, really screw up. This way is entrepreneurs love big challenges. And the sweet spot is really, really small. It's like a 5% gradient. So you want to push work 5% harder than you normally work, maybe a little bit more than that. Entrepreneurs will take on challenges. They're 20%, 30%, 40% greater than their skill set simply for the thrill of it. And I'm not saying don't go after the big challenges. High hard goals. Standard motivation theory says having high hard goals will increase motivation 11 to 25%. It's a big deal. But chunk them down so that what you're doing today is just in that challenge skills sweet spot. So in other words, start your day with 90 minutes to 120 minutes uninterrupted concentration, and make sure you're pushing on yourself to work in that sweet spot. So what does this look like? I want to give you four, three examples of what this looks like in organizations in the real world. Probably the most famous example. A lot of different companies have been sort of, of built around flow for a long time. Microsoft has flow ideas sort of built into them there start Patagonia, Toyota as well. And in the 90s, Toyota adopted what many people are familiar with is Kaizen. Kaizen is simply a way of tuning the challenge skills. Balance says if you work at Toyota, you don't just work in the line, you can make the line better. So not only are you filling bottle caps, you're trying to find a better way to put bottle caps on the bottles, right? And as a result, what happened, people who were doing manual labor so they could contribute the challenge skills balance just went up slightly and Toyota basically ran away with the car business for a lot of years. Facebook gets at it in a very different way, but it's also really cool. They have something called hack a month. So if you work at Facebook, they sort of accept the fact that especially when people come into tech, they often don't get the job they want, they get the job they can get. So maybe people are in the wrong place. And so they acknowledge this and they're in the wrong place. Meaning they can't get the challenge skills balance right or they can't get the job right. So if you've worked for Facebook for over a year, you can jump into any department you want, right? You're in coding, you can jump into marketing, you're in marketing, you jump into coding, you can hack a month, you can spend a month there, see if you like it, see if it works. And what they found is because it allows people to say, oh, I'm not being challenged over here, I'm going to jump over here. This is a challenge that's totally right for me. Tunes the challenge skills balance. People end up staying in their new position and really contributing. One of the reasons they contribute is they get the skills balance right. It drops them into flow. Productivity goes up, innovation goes up, everything goes up. This has been very, very successful for Facebook, for myself. I think about it really simply. I write books. So when I start a book, I can write about 350 words any day of the week, really easily 500 words gets a little hard. I gotta lean into that. I gotta work a little bit. So when I start a book, I try to write 500 words a day. In the middle, 7, 800 words a day. And by the end of the book, when I sort of know where I'm going, it's a thousand words a day. That's how I tune up the challenge skills balance on a daily basis. But you really have to sort of Run the experiment in your own life. You got to find your own edge. So if there's two things you walk away with this with, start your day with long blocks of uninterrupted concentration and really, really prioritize that and really lean into what you're doing, you want to take it the next step. If you go to flowresearchcollective.com Flowblockers this is a free diagnostic. Anybody can take it. It will analyze your life. It'll look at what's going on with you, what are your biggest flow blockers, and it'll give you that analysis. The thought I sort of want to leave you with before I wrap this up is I think everything I was talking about today puts a wonderful yet sort of terrible burden on each and every one of us. Because you got to sort of ask yourself, what grand challenges would you go after, what impossible challenges would you try to slay? If I told you you could be 500% more productive, you could be 400% more creative, cut learning times in half. That's actually what flow makes possible for each and every one of us. But what you choose to do with this information, it's entirely up to you. Thanks for listening. And for anybody who wants a whole lot more information, flowresearchcollective.com there's tons of free videos, there's tons of whatever. And for somebody who wants a in depth training, zero to dangerous is our deeper trainings. You can go there and sign up for a free consult with one of my coaches and they'll see if the program is right for you. And by the way, people go through zero to dangerous. You go through it with a PhD psychologist or PhD neuroscientist as your individual coach. So everything we do is very, very, very hard, science based. And that's sort of our goal.

Thank you so much. So I've got a couple questions. One's from Chris Voss and his question is how did you get over Lyme disease?

I want to say one thing before he answers that and then I want to put the question in context. First of all, for those of you that care on our must read list for becoming a better negotiator is both the Rise of Superman and Stealing Fire. Because being a better negotiator requires a kind of thinking peak performance thinking that you get get when you learn from Steven. So been recommended. I recommend everything he writes. Now the context for my question is the main character of the book west of Jesus is a guy named Steven Kotler. And it's a Nonfiction book. And at the start of the book, this guy is debilitated with Lyme disease. He can't get his ass out of bed, but about every two weeks and his life is falling apart. Now, the dude that we just watched give a dynamic presentation with energy over the top is not debilitated by Lyme disease. So what happened in between those two things, Chris?

It's a good question. And so Lyme disease, for those of you guys who don't know, is an autoimmune condition. And an autoimmune condition is essentially your nervous system going haywire. So a lot of my work with flow sort of got amplified by my having Lyme disease because I ended up using flow to cure myself of the Lyme disease. And like, the question is, why the hell would that work? And I wasn't actually the one who answered that question. Harvard cardiologist Herb Benson is the guy who figured that out, and he has written extensively on this. But so in flow, those very same neurochemicals that I talked about, two things happened. First of all, they're all immune system boosters. So every time I was going into flow, those chemicals were showing up in my system and massively amplifying my immune system. More importantly, as I said, Lyme is a nervous system gone haywire. I talked about when you move into flow, your stress hormones are flushed out of your system and they're replaced by these kind of positive, feel good neurochemicals. One of the things that happens with an autoimmune, you can't find normal anymore. You just, you've been sick so long, don't know where, how to baseline every time you move into flow because these stress hormones get fleshed out. It was returning me to baseline, it was sort of zeroing out my nervous system. So doing that coupled to the huge boosted immune system where that came from. And it's not just me. Herb Benson has argued, and I think he's massively overstating the case, but it gets at what I'm trying to say, that all so called cases of spontaneous healing and spontaneous remission, he thinks they have the same mechanism at their heart, that there's a flow state or something very similar at the heart of this. Now, I don't think that's true because there you see cases of remission and cancer and things like that where it doesn't have anything to do with your nervous system going haywire. So I think he's overstating, but it does get at some of the health benefits of flow for sure.

Awesome. Thank you. One of our interviews that. When we first did one, damn near a decade ago, maybe eight years ago, when I think was our first time we did an interview, you were talking about how your friends literally dragged you into the ocean, put you on a surfboard. So if you could take yourself back to that time where you were so physically distraught, I mean, you had no energy. Like, what did it require? Because it seems like had you not had interventions from people that cared about you to put you into a situation that led to the. That, you know, I call it the first domino, right? I got a domino behind me back here. You know, these domino effects in our life, or something happens. I mean, what. Where were you at in that space, Joe?

I mean, I, you know, I. I was going to kill. I was going to end my life. I'd been in bed for three years. My life. I couldn't walk across a room. I had no cognitive function. My brain. I could focus for maybe a half an hour to an hour a day. And then it's called brain fog in lime circles, right? They. You just. It's like there's cotton candy where your head used to be. And. No, I had. I mean, the doctors pulled me off medicine. They didn't think there was anything else they could do for me. And I had, like. I had a big bottle of sleeping pills and I had a lot of booze, and it was just a question of when. And then my friend showed up and demanded we go surfing. And it was, you know, it was kind of an absurd request. As I said, I couldn't walk across the room, but they. They dragged me out there and they gave me a giant board, and they, you know, I caught that first wave and dropped into a flow state. And, you know, one of the things that happens in flow is there's a massive reduction in pain. So that physically, it felt amazing. But it was the cognitive stuff. Like, almost immediately I could think. I felt great. It was just. And immediately I started to feel better. And that was the question, like, how the hell could surfing in these altered states of consciousness have any impact on my health? It didn't make any sense. And when I ended up solving and figuring out was flow, it dovetailed with all my other work because I started to realize that the same state of consciousness that got me from seriously subpar back to normal, it was taking normal people all the way up to Superman. And that was sort of the insight, right? That sort of led to everything else.

No, I mean, within everything you just said, it seems, is the seed to so many answers to pain, depression, disease, everything. If you can just, you know, if you can orchestrate that or have someone.

Let me actually just take it one step farther. So we. With Dr. Andrew Huberman at Stanford, we're mapping. We're working very hard to map what happens in the brain in the first two seconds of flow, like, just as you drop in. And one of the things that is sort of a guiding guidepost and we believe is that flow is actually the inverse of the traumatic stress that produces ptsd. Right. The traumatic stress, that's the heart of ptsd. Flow is sort of the exact opposite of that. Same systems of the brain are utilized. Flow. PTSD is what happens when mass information comes in. You can't handle it at all. Flow is that same information comes in, and you can really work with it. It's the exact opposite side of the same coin, we think. So hopefully, as we take this work farther, even though this isn't the work I do, we'll get some new insights and possibly some new cures for PTSD along the way, which would be really cool. Yeah.

And let me say this, Stephen. I don't know if you have any thoughts on this. I believe one of the places of a person in recovery for addiction, in recovery versus recovered, let's say, if you were to use that terminology, although many people would debate this, I feel when the suffering from the craving ceases, I think flow state. Being in a flow state is the place of peace and connection, because, you know, they use the Johann Hari line, you know, the opposite of addiction is connection. And when I feel you're. You're ultimately connected with, you know, yourself, with inactivity, with source, whatever you want to call it, being in that state, it's very hard to. You're in a responsive state in life, not a reactive state. And in a reactive state, there's that pain and there's angst. And so if there's anything that I would hope to discover for my work with people in addiction recovery, which is why this is so important for me to hear you talk about this, is what can we do to get. To help humans literally get into a flow state, not just know what it is, but literally get there and do the things needed to get there, because I think that's where so much recovery actually lies in the addiction field.

So a lot of people don't like what I'm about to say, but it's the biology of it. You don't. You can't. Addiction. There's no such thing as. All we can do is addiction management. All of life is addiction management. When we talk about a habit, that's an addiction. They're just positive addictions. Flow Csikszentmihalyi said flow's the most addictive state on earth. But other, unlike other addictions, drugs, sexual, whatever, which lead backwards, flows into action. That, because you're constantly using your skills to the utmost, needs forward into the future. But all recovery is about replacing neurochemical addiction with neurochemical addiction, right? When he says the opposite of, you know, his community, what he's really saying is, hey, you were addicted to, if it's cocaine, you were addicted to dopamine. If it was speed, you were addicted to norepinephrine if it's in opiates, right? Those, those are endorphins. When you talk about replacing with community, you're talking about, oh, you can replace the addiction for cocaine with oxytocin, which is what you get, endorphins, which is what you write. It's an actual swap, right? You're trading neurochemical addiction for neurochemical addiction, which is why Flo has such a good tracker. There's a lot of treatment facilities that will take kids and use action sports as a, as a treatment protocol, or outdoor adventures as a treat protocol because they produce flow states. And you're just overlying one addiction with a much more powerful, productive one.

Well, just because I have to speak to that, just for terminology, even if it's semantics, I know exactly what you're saying. Like, one of the things that I think really put this in my brain the most is I don't know where I read it or heard from Mahaly Csikszentmihalyi when he said that the same neural pathways that the world's greatest performers, athletes, entertainers do to get into a flow state are the same neural pathways that an addict uses for self destruction. And so we're using the same roads to, you know, neural pathways to either destroy our life or to do amazing, wonderful things. And the way that I think of, I think of the term addiction because people say, yeah, what about a positive addiction? To me, I've associated addiction with suffering. And so you call it whatever, but, you know, same addiction to, you know, it's the craving state. And some cravings will, you know, you know, push your life forward. Others will, you know, destroy your own and you will leave a lot of shrapnel and hurting other people along the way. So again, I think the answer to so much human suffering lies within what you're talking about here, which is awesome.

We used to think floating was a binary like work like a light switch. You're either, you're out of the zone. And what we now know is a four stage cycle, the actual state. So you don't. Nobody gets to live in a flow state. That's it. That's a total misnomer. You have to move through every stage of the cycle in the back end of flow state. After a flow state there's a built in recovery period and it's critical to have an active recovery protocol in place. Now passive recovery is what we're all familiar with. Passive recovery is TV and a of piece that actually doesn't do anything for your body in terms of recovery. It doesn't actually work. In fact, TV is a disaster. You don't know this. You have to slow the brain down for recovery. It's got to go into alpha state waves and tv because every time it switch every tv, every time it cuts to a new image will jump the brain up into a beta state and you won't feel it. But it literally blocks recovery. But yes, there is a recovery stage in the back end of flow. So deep delta wave sleep is really important and active recovery. So a yoga session, stretching, you don't have to exhaust yourself. It's just stretching the body out. Epsom salt baths, saunas are really, really good. Mindfulness practices are really, really good. But you have to, have to have to do that. And deep delta wave sleep is super important because learning is super accelerated in flow. But we don't lay down memories unless we're in deep delta wave sleep. So you can learn all kinds of new shit and flow. But if you don't sleep afterwards, it's not. Skill level is not going to go up over time because you're not actually going to remember the stuff that you're learning. So you really do need an active recovery protocol in the back end of flow. Flow is actually the brain's fight response. We've talked about fight or flight. It always starts with that fight response. So you're always going to. It's always that moment of like oh wow, this is harder than I thought. You lean in, right? That extra focus, that little bit of testosterone and that's always going to show up in flow. But it's a really narrow balance. We talked about the challenge skills, balance, anxiety levels. Anxiety is essentially cortisol and norepinephrine and both of them have a sweet spot with flow. Like you need a certain amount of norepinephrine and cortisol to put yourself into flow. But too much, right? A big spike in anxiety and you won't get there. But you hear extreme athletes all the time, super high risk situations, drives them right into flow. But it's often because you have some familiarity with the high risk situations, right? Like you sort of know what you're doing and you're not really cranking up that high. So it's a really double edged sword. And I always tell people, don't use physical risk as a flow trigger. It is a flow trigger. But don't do like for athletes, we want them in flow before they start doing a dumb and dangerous thing. Because why would you, right. It's a dumb idea to use dumb and dangerous things as a way to try to trigger flow. Wait till you're already performing at your best before you do the hard stuff that could really send you to the hospital. So some yes. Too much, no.

You know, one of the reasons I wanted you to come and give this presentation, which I'm super appreciative for, is I believe with everyone here, just having them increase by tiny percentages their ability to get into a flow state, it would make their impact their human happiness, their income, I mean everything would increase. And I've always liked the line of how do you solve one problem that solves 10 problems or 50 problems or 100 problems?

Sleep.

What recommendations would you have for improving sleep or solving severe sleep issues?

Let me broaden that out a little bit because so when we talk about, I call them the positive psychology basics. There's basically for 30, 40 years we've been looking at kind of like what are the foundations of peak performance. What do you. Flow is sort of advanced work, right? But what do you need just to perform at your best in sleep? It's very, very clear that you need seven, eight hours a night of sleep. Sleep very, very clear, everybody. There are occasionally people can function a little less, but as a general rule, no. And I always tell people like try take it. There's a bunch of cognitive tests online. Try taking them when you're normal and then when you're a little debilitated, see how you do. You'll never not get enough sleep at night. But what I always tell people is sleep isn't alone in this. When you talk about the kind of the basis of energy, right, you're really talking about three sleep, hydration, nutrition and social support. And so what I tell people is you can screw one of those up a day, right? You cannot get enough sleep at night as long if you've nailed your hydration and nutrition, right? You're drinking lots of water, eating right, and you're getting social support, meaning like there are people around you who love you, right? And the brain treats social support at a really foundational level. It's an energy question more than anything else. And this doesn't mean you have to have millions of friends. It means you need high quality relationships. And it's at a really simple level. Whenever the brain faces any kind of challenge, any kind of problem, one of the first things it says is, hey, are you solo or do you got people around to help you solve this problem? Because if you're solo, it's a big ass problem. And if you've got a robust network, oh, you can relax a little bit more. And it really has an energy level impact. So I tell people you can screw up sleep if you've nailed hydration, nutrition and social support for that day, vice versa. So it's not just a standalone, oh, you're going to fail if you don't get your seven, eight hours of sleep at night. But it's sort of, I look at those three things and you can only sort of mess around with, with one per day. And I think, by the way, during COVID during times of real crises, I don't think you can really mess around with many of those for very long. It'll come bite you in the ass.

Is there any advice moving forward? People should read anything of your work. I mean, you already gave some links and stuff. If you had to say to everyone here, this is going to give you the highest possibility of integrating flow and better performance and health into your life. Here's step one, here's step two. Here's step three. If there's a way that you can maybe summarize some of what you said.

Like that, I'm going to go really fast through. I'm going to give you one extra piece of information. But this is really what I think. I think the three energy basics we just talked about, right? Hydration, nutrition, sleep, social support, the next layer up and you just sort of hit on. This is stuff you have to do to tune your nervous system, right? This is the stuff your daughter needs to be doing. And we're really clear on it. It's a daily gratitude practice, a daily mindfulness practice, and a daily exercise practice. And you got to pick one of the three. Five minutes for gratitude, 12 to 20 minutes for mindfulness, some kind of respiration practice, or 20 to 40 minutes of exercise. Not talking about exercise or physical benefits, talking about Cognitive, you want to exercise until it gets quiet upstairs. That's technically known as exercise induced transient hypofrontality. It's the front end of a flow state. You're tired out your brain, so your prefrontal cortex is shut down. That's why it's quiet upstairs. So you need one of the. I always say you can't. Like under normal conditions, you can screw up. This one of the sleep, nutrition, social support one. And with the other three I just talked about, normally I tell people to do one a day. I think in times of crisis you got to do two. And then literally 90 minutes of uninterrupted concentration and leaning into the challenge. Skills, balance. The only other thing I would add in to this is we talk about most people, primary flow activity and their secondary flow activity, meaning a primary flow activity is the.

The thing.

For me, it's skiing, right? I've been doing it since I was five. 90% of the time I go skiing, it just drops me into flow. I love it. That's my primary flow activity. My secondary flow activity is writing, right? It's 60 to 70% of the time I get into flow. The funny thing about flow is it's essentially a focusing skill. So the more flow you get, the more flow you get. So if you get a lot of flow dancing or writing or painting or whatever, actually spending time in flow, doing the thing you love, going back to work, you're going to end up with more flow in your work life. Ana mirrors. Peak performers. We don't often we forget that we don't do the things that we kind of did as kids that were really, really flowy, as we get busier, as we get families, etc. Etc. And that's the only other thing I wanted to add in, like remember to go back, go back to that one, Even if it's just a little bit, 20 minutes a day, that flowy joy for life. Neurochemically, it's really important. And it's the thing that always during times of crisis and as we get busier as professionals, that's the shit that always goes out the window. And there are really good neurobiological peak performance reasons that you shouldn't do that.

Steven, anything else I didn't ask you or something that you wanted to say that we didn't cover most of this stuff.

If you're in this group, right, You're a peak performer, you're in this group. A lot of the flow stuff you're doing naturally, the human body wants to perform at its best. We will naturally sort of move in this direction. We're wired for it and we'll match this way. So, like, yes, they don't teach you in school, but you've been doing this stuff anyways. It's really about just understanding the science underneath it and how to systematize it a little bit to really start cranking it up. And so that's it. Bye, everybody. It was really fun hanging out with you guys.

Guys, awesome. Thanks, brother. Appreciate it. Don't miss another episode of Genius Network. Subscribe today@gienius network.com forward sl subscribe if you would like access to the show, notes or resources mentioned, please visit genius network.com199.