Finding Brave 170: How To Become a Peak Performer and Achieve The Impossible with Steven Kotler

Hello everybody, Kathy Caprino here and thank you so much for tuning into Finding Brave today. I hope you find the show enlivening, inspiring and full of ideas that help you live and work as you truly long to. I so appreciate you being here. And speaking of appreciation, I am so thrilled to share that Amazon Music is now a sponsor for Finding Brave. So if you feel as I do that music is an important, enriching part of your life and you would like unlimited access to self 70 million songs today. I hope you'll hop on our special link which is getamazonmusic.com finding brave and get our 30 day free trial offer. Again, unlimited access to 70 million songs. That's a whole lot of music and a lot of listening joy. Thank you again so much and enjoy the show. Hello everybody, Kathy Caprino here and welcome to Finding Brave.

I'm.

I'm so excited about this episode. My head is spinning. I have so many questions for our amazing guest today, Stephen Kotler. Steven, you are in the middle of a best selling book smash press junket and I'm so grateful for your 30 minutes here. Thank you. Thank you for being here.

My pleasure. It's good to be with you.

Where are you located right now? I didn't ask that before.

I'm in Tahoe. Ish.

Good for you, good for you. I'll ask you later how everything's going Covid wise there and everything. You'll let me know. Hope it's all good. All right people, you're in for an amazing treat. I hope you're on your walk listening and can concentrate because we're going to talk all about your book, Stephen, the Art of Impossible and we are talking about how to become a peak performer and achieve the impossible. And you know, let me just tell you Steven's bio because you're going to fall off your chair like I did. So you know the illustriousness that's coming at you. Stephen is a New York Times bestselling author, an award winning journalist and the executive director of Flow Research Collective. He's one of the world's leading experts on human performance. I'm nervous. Author of 10 bestsellers out of 13 books. You are so prolific on top of all the other things you do. I've written two books and I swear it almost killed me both times. So I bow tip my ass to you. Your latest book, which hit shelves January, I think January 21st, right. The art of Impossible. But the other books are the future is faster than you think. Stealing Fire, the Rise of Superman, Bold Abundance and More. Steven's work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated in 40 languages, and appeared in over 100 publications. New York Times Magazine, Wired, Time, Harvard Business Review. It goes on and on. And you're the co host of Flow Research Collective Radio, a top 10 iTunes science podcast.

Wow.

Sorry that you're not so busy. Sorry you're probably bored. And check out Steven's website. We're going to give you all the links. So many luminaries have endorsed your work and said how amazing it is. So thank you again. Now we're going to dig in all about. You know why this book now is really important to me since you've. You've been immersed in this issue about peak performance for a long, long time. But I think people that don't know of you as in depth as others would love to know. Stephen, how did you first get into this? What made you say this? I have to understand. How are we doing the impossible? Will you tell us a little?

Yeah, for sure. I became a journalist in the early 1990s, and as you probably know, journalism is this astounding career where they let you, like, exploit your curios. You're curious about something, you can go learn about it and get paid for it, which is incredible. That still doesn't make any sense to me. But in the early 1990s, I was really interested in sort of two groups of things. The first was fascinated with neuroscience. Neuroscience. In the early 1990s, this was when we just started to understand human behavior. So you started to be able to go from like cells doing this in the brain to people doing this in the world. And that was sort of the very first time we'd actually known enough neuroscience for you to start making those connections at a de. Deeper level.

90S. The 90s?

Yeah, the 1990s.

Kind of late.

Yeah. I mean, by the way, like, this is shocking to most people, but for example, emotions. Emotions, literally your feelings were not a serious topic for neuroscientists until 1996, when a guy named Jaak Pansep traced the neuron by neuron chain of the six basic seven basic million emotions. Until that point, neuroscientists were like, yeah, emotions, those are squishy things that psychologists study. We don't know what those are. So, yes, they were late to the party, but it was quite a party when they finally showed up. So I was fascinated with that stuff. And I was also fascinated with action adventure sports, which back in the 1990s were just starting to happen. So surfing, skydiving, skiing, snowboarding the like, we're starting to get to mainstream attention. The X Games had just gotten started, the Gravity Games. And so these were like deep subcultures that were becoming mainstream for the first time. I was fascinated with both. I was spending a lot of time with these professional action adventure sport athletes. The early so called extreme athletes and the 1990s are now spoken about as the great era of impossible in action sports, meaning more things that had never been done before in history. They weren't just being done, they were being iterated upon. The rate of development was unlike anything anybody had ever seen in sports or really otherwise. And it was across the boards. You would see it in surfing and skiing and snowboarding and rock climbing and, and that in itself, like people were doing things that we thought were impossible. That was mind bending, but was really mind bending. And I sort of knew a little bit more of this because of the work I was doing on the neuroscience psychology side. But all the athletes I was hanging out with, they were not your typical. Like they weren't typical anything. Most of them had horrific childhoods. They had broken, broken homes, really tough childhoods, upbringings, very little money, very little education. There's a lot of risk taking, a lot of drugs, a lot of alcohol. Normally you put those things together in a community, people die young. That's what happens. Instead, what happened in these communities was they reinvented what was possible for our species. And I, like, I wanted to understand what the hell was going on. Like why was this happening? Where was this coming from? And that question so fascinated me that I started taking it out of action sports. I took it into business, I took it into science and technology and culture, everywhere, art, everywhere. You could take that question of what does it take to do something that has never been done and people don't believe is possible? And I asked that question sort of everywhere and essentially wrote books about what I discovered. Right. And so that's my career.

There it is.

When it got to the point that I thought that I wanted to actually be leading, you know, leading research in this, I founded the Flow Research Collective where Jason, a giant collection of neuroscientists and psychologists teamed up with a bunch of different major universities. And so we studied the neurobiology of peak human performance. What's going on in the brain when people are performing, they're absolute best.

I have so many questions. Why does this have to be 30 minutes? Can I just ask? You know, I'm a former corporate person, 18 years, then I became a therapist. Then I'm doing this work 15 years. So I have a lens that's different from other people. But here's here from that lens. Here's a question. What were you like as a kid? Did you. Were you a scientist back then?

It's funny somebody else asked this recently. I was not a scientist. So my parents, my mother. My parents had me when they were very young and very poor and. And they had no real idea how to like raise a kid, I don't think. And they had moved. I was born in Chicago, but very quickly we moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where my family knew nobody. So we cut off. There's no support network. My parents were, you know, in their early 20s, not a lot of money. How do you raise a kid? What do you do? My mom didn't know how to. What she was doing, but she knew books were good and curiosity was good. So we would go to the library and come home with a thousand books, literally. And she would. We would read through together after book together till I could read. And anything that really I would get curious about. Even though there wasn't a ton of money, they found a way. You know the great thing about especially the Midwest in the 70s, there were all these classes you could essentially take for very, very little money. So I got interested in dinosaurs and suddenly I was at the art history museum taking classes on dinosaurs. And where the natural history, that sort of stuff was, was available to me even if you didn't have a lot of money. Like there were really good programs at that time in the Midwest. So we availed ourselves public libraries and all these great programs. And so I was around science for a very long time and I was around scientists. I am not naturally gifted at math, which I can learn it, but I have to work really hard to learn math. I was having this conversation yesterday. I can do things with language naturally. Naturally my brain does that. Math I can understand, but I have to work really hard to do it. So it wasn't. Science didn't seem like super open to me. It wasn't until I got out. When I was doing. So when you're doing action sports also you're.

You did them. I saw. If I'm going to study them, I might. Did you feel you had to?

Well, I was always interested in them when I was. So two things on action sports. One, I was very interested in them. I thought I was an expert skier. I had skied since I was 4 years old. I got ski bummed after college and then I got my first assignment to go skiing with professional athletes in Chamonix. In Europe. And it was the most like what I was looking at. I could tell you crazy stories, it'll fill your whole half an hour. It looked like magic, right? It was like I've been doing this thing my entire life. I thought I was expert at it. And what I saw was not only was I not, I was barely a beginner in the world that these guys were in and women actually at the time. But on top of that it was, it looked, with the stuff they were doing, looked like it was defying the laws of physics. It didn't make sense, I didn't like, none of it made any sense. It was very capitating to see. The other thing is action sports take place in very remote places as a general rule. And when you're, especially back in the early 1990s, adventure travel was part of the action sports world then. So I was spending time in rainforests and all over the place. And when you go into those environments, the only other people out there besides the athletes are scientists. So I, yeah, I like, I remember I being in a, it was a jungle. It was a new eco lodge in Ecuador in the Amazon. It was maybe the first eco lodge that had ever opened. And we got there and it was crazy dangerous. There was an oil war going on, people were killing each other and we were sort of like stuck there and the road in and out was sort of barricaded and the only other people there were scientists and there's a fly in to monolithic rainforest ecologist. And I started, you know, I'd get to know the scientist and we'd have long days and I'd be like, hey, I'm here, use me as your graduate student, you know what I mean? My stuff doesn't start for like three days. So take me out into the rainforest, teach me stuff and I'll just work for you and what do you need? And so I started having hands on training in science along the way just hanging out with these people and I started to realize, hey, wait a minute, math or not, I'm really good at this. Like my brain does this, I understand this stuff. And then it was sort of a very exciting thing because once I sort of figured that out it was, well, what else can I learn?

What you said is a lesson in achieving the impossible. I think, I mean it's so much, you pack so much in. I want to ask one more thing, then we'll dive into the book and the key messages. But you said that you're an extreme introvert. We said that, right? I want People to hear those words because, you know, I've. I know everything I mentioned you've done 10 books on. But I'm an extrovert. And I've seen there's such a bias in our society, in corporate America, in the working world, against introverts. And we're starting to see that and see the incredible gifts of introverts. But I'm really, for all the introverts listening, I'm interested in how your introversion was a gift in this. Can you just talk about that for a minute?

Oh, yeah. I mean, so I do a lot of public facing stuff and that's taken years of practice to do.

Well, saw your TED Talk and your mind Valley talks. Wow.

But. And I like, I go. I've been. I've literally been on stage since a little kid. Like, whenever something scares me, I go right at it. So, like, I don't like being in front of people, but I go, right. I've been going right at that my whole life. That said, I am. I will spend 17 hours a day alone. I'll talk to my wife for 10 minutes. She's an extreme introvert. And like, this could go on for months. Right? We'll see.

That's all you're talking.

Just us.

So Covid didn't bother you much?

No, I like, you know, once the ski resorts open back up. No, I like, literally like this. There's not much difference even. I mean, I run a huge company. There's 70 people that work for me, but we're distributed. I've got a CEO who's awesome and I, you know, I can still do it over zoom in this way. But I ideally will be alone 10 to 14 hours a day. I ski alone, I hike my dogs alone. I don't go out to eat. I don't like going out to eat. I literally, I tell people, if you want to see me, you have to ski with me or you have to work with me. Otherwise you're not going to see me.

Oh, no. Or you do a podcast.

So.

But what I really want people to hear is how your introversion helps you.

But. So I have to tell you, this is a through line, through Art of impossible, true line. If you talk to the world's greatest performers, every one of our. Every superpower you have is the exact opposite of your kryptonite. Right? All your kryptonites. Every one of your weaknesses are your greatest gifts. Because there's superpowers on the other side of all of them. Yes, I'm an extreme introvert. But I do a job where people always ask, how are you so prolific? How did you. Wrote 11, you know, 11 books in it in a decade, and nine have been bestsellers. Like, how do you do that? Well, one way is I can focus 14 hours a day without a problem. I can sit down and write for five hours at a time, and it's totally fine for me. And, you know, that took training, but. And it also. What was the weirdest thing in the world for me? And I so remember when this happened, I was almost 30 by the time I figured this out, but I was like, you know what? I don't actually have to have a social life. I know I'm supposed to have a social life, right? Like, I know, like, you're supposed to, like, go out into the world and.

Do you have some friends here?

What's happening? I always had friends, but it was really like, oh, my God. I don't actually. Like, it's totally fine if I stay in all the time and I just write and surf. At the time, I was living in Los Angeles, so I was surfing and not skiing. But literally, I was like, everything else I don't actually have to do. I know. You know, it freaks my mother out that I don't have a girlfriend, or you know what I mean? Like, that stuff, of course. But I was like, oh, my God. And it was. One of the great things about my wife is she was. She's an extreme introvert, and I think she's probably worse than I am. So I learned from her that, like, it is totally fine. Like, it's totally fine when people are like, oh, I'm coming to town. I want to see you. And I'm like, no, you don't actually like this. This is fine. Like, we're good on zoom. I love talking to you on the phone. We're going to keep it there. Like, it. You know what I mean?

It's my mother. I haven't seen her in 11 months, and she. 96, and she's like, zoom is good. Oh, my gosh. Oh, Stephen, you're a hoot. I love it. People, I hope you're. That is such a riveting concept that. Look at what you think is your kryptonite and turn it around. Where is it? The gift is that.

Yeah. The way to look at it. Let me put that in a slightly different. Because this is also worth a damn, probably as much as anybody alive. I've been in the room with more people who've done, like, impossible, amazing things than almost anybody else. Right. Whether it's turning science fiction ideas into science fact, technology or even performance stuff. Or take your pick. I've met more of these people in 30 years because I've gone out of my way and to do it. And as one thing I can tell you about everybody, I've met the most successful people in the world. They are running from something just as fast as they are running towards something. And I will tell you, I believe that you need that double motivation. It's hard to get someplace worth going and having that extra motivation of there was something bad that happened in the past that I am building on top of and trying. Right. That is incredibly useful. It's incredibly useful and it's in today's environment. Just as an extension of this, there is. I run into this in the peak performance world and it's related to stuff that's in art. Impossible. This is this idea right now that people are like, oh, I'm broke and I gotta fix me before I can even worry about how to perform my best. Right? And that's a very recent idea, and it doesn't seem to be backed up by the science at all. The exact same things that will get you from seriously subpar to normal will get you from normal up to Superman. Peak performance is nothing more or less than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us.

Now, I would love you to take a look at my book that just came out about the seven most damaging power gaps that professional women face. I look at where you gapped, I'm not looking at your strengths. Those are rocking. I'm looking at what's holding you back from using your strengths and what. Oh, somebody.

Hi, Kiko. Yeah, this is Kiko.

Oh, sweet. Because I find when you can close those gaps, you soar the way you're naturally meant to store. And that all the cultural programming and family programming and all that stuff that, particularly for women, that has constrained us, held us back, does get in the way from people.

Yeah, yeah, Kathy. So I talk about this a little bit towards the end of our impossible, but I don't even know if I mentioned this particular effect. So if you go into early peak performance, the field is essentially founded by Friedrich Nietzsche and William James. They're the first people who are interested in peak performance after Darwin writes the Origin of the Species. So they're like, oh, wait a minute. The mind evolves, bodies evolve. We have to take that into account if we're talking about peak performance from the start of the field through, like, really, Carl Jung, you're talking like 1930s, there is an overwhelming belief across the boards that mommy and culture way too much. And if we can't get free of our family and our cultural baggage, we cannot perform at our best. Now the humanist psychologists come along in the 40s, Abraham Maslow and Adler and a bunch of other people and they're brilliant, but they, they, and they change that. They're like, well, you can work with your culture. There's. And it's an open question, right? It remains an open question. I mean, there's an argument that says help. These men mostly were working in Victorian Europe and that was a very restrictive, blah, blah, blah place. And it's different today. And you can make that argument, but as you just made the case, it's not different for everybody. Right. There are people whose world is just as heavy, restrictive and tight, culturally bound now as it was 100 years ago. And so it's an interesting question. I don't, you're not, you know, the book doesn't require you shrugging off the weight of family and culture to kind of improve your performance. But it's a real question, it's an open question in the field and for the first 50 years everyday agreed with you. They said, look, you cannot do this until you break free of that stuff.

Interesting.

Wow.

So fantastic. All right, let's get to the heart of your book. You know, I want to know all of this. You break it down. You offered me three four key bullets that I want to frame this discussion. You said, we're all capable of so much more than we know, that everyone is hardwired for peak performance, that our potential is invisible, which really went ding, ding, ding, especially to ourselves. And finally, it's a system. So, Kent, would you agree that those are kind of the four.

Yeah, those are the. If we, if we cover those four points, let's do that damage.

Let's do it.

So let me take them from the tarp. The first is, this is what 30 years of studying this stuff has taught me, is that consistently we are all capable of so much more than we know. And as you, as you said, I'm going to skip your second point. We'll come back to it in a second. Human potential is invisible, especially to ourselves. And this is. There's two points here worth making when I say a statement like that. Some of this is. You're familiar with Adam Grant, I'm sure.

Yes, of course.

Adam's fabulous research. Worked with David Epson, some other people have worked on this, but you don't know what you're going to be good at or what you're going to like until you actually do it and start to improve. And this is, this is, by the way, you could go to LeBron James and let's say LeBron's never played badminton, right? He's one of the best athletes in the history of the universe, but he's never played Batman. LeBron, will you like admin? Will you be good at it? And you would think, well, this is one of the best athletes in the universe. He's going to be able to tell you if he's going to like bad. And the research says no. Like even that closely related, you won't. You don't know if you're going to like it or be good at it. That's part A. Part B is we only find out we're capable of by using and pushing on our skills to the utmost again and again and again. Put it more formally, Human capability is an emergent property. It emerges when we push on our skills to the utmost. And like every other emergent property, it's invisible until it's there. Or, you know, to put it really prosaically, what's everybody's experience of learning anything? I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck. Oh, look, I don't suck, right? Learning is an invisible process. It takes place unconsciously. Our experience. I don't care if you're best in the world or an absolute novice, it's still I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck. Oh, look, I don't suck, right? And you can choose to take I suck personally or not. That's entirely up to you. But it's not going to change the experience of. That's what learning is. And so we can't, we cannot know what we're going to be good at, what we're doing great at, what our potential is until actually put it in play and really push on it. So Those are points 1.

May I just amplify that for one second, Stephen, if you don't mind? I love it when neuroscience mirrors what I work people through in a, in career coaching. But one of the things out of the five steps we take people through is step number four. Try it on, try it on, try it on. You can't know what you're capable of to. You try on the living identity of it. And you certainly can't know if you want to work here, there, anywhere if you haven't really physically, spiritually, emotionally, behaviorally tried it on. Would you agree that that marries up what you're saying?

I Totally agree. I absolutely agree.

Okay, point number two.

I cut you off. What was point so on your list, we're all high? Oh, yeah. So let me, let me just put this really. We started with the simple concept that peak performance is nothing more or less than giving our biology to work for us rather than against us. At the heart of the biology is the state of consciousness known to researchers as flow. Flow is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, it's any of those moments of rapt attention, total absorption, where you get so focused on the task at hand, everything else just seems to disappear. Time passes strangely, your sense of self gets really quiet. Extra awareness will start to merge, and all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, tend to go through the roof. That's flow. It's a universal. So when I say we're all hardwired for peak performance, flow shows up in anyone, anywhere, provides certain initial conditions are met. It's common to all mammals. It's not even all humans. Like, you're dealing with a very foundational evolutionary system here. This is a very old part of our biology. And everybody can utilize flow. And the amplification you get in flow, motivation, grit, learning, creativity, empathy, perspective, the list goes on and on. All of these skills are massively amplified depending on whose numbers you're looking at. It's often like 500% of a baseline. These are. This is a huge step function worth of difference in kind of core performance skills we're all hardwired for. Getting into flow shows up in anyone anywhere. Everybody listened to me, can get into flow. Whenever I saw the impossible become possible. Flow was always part of the equation. It wasn't the whole equation, but it was a large portion of the equation. What was the whole of the equation? That's the final part, which is there's a sequence, there's an order. This thing. When you talk about our biology, I mostly worry. I mostly work on cognitive peak performance, the mental side of the equation. Commonly on cognitive peak performance. Right. When you talk about cognitive peak performance in our biology, now that's a vast bunch of stuff, but it's a limited bunch of stuff. And it's really four categories. These are catch all terms. We can go into detail, but there's. For any task, you need the motivation skills to get into the game. You need the learning skills that allow you to continue to play. You need creativity skills so you can steer. Creative problem solving is how we steer. And then you need flow skills to amplify the results, that's the entire suite of cognitive peak performance skills. Now, when I say motivation, when psychologists or neuroscientists say motivation, they actually mean intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, grit and goal setting. It's a bigger bunch of things, but it's still a limited bunch of stuff. Learning is the same, creativity is the same. My point here is it turns out all this because all this stuff evolved millions of years ago when these are ancient systems. It evolved to work in a certain order. Which is not to say that like if you didn't line up your intrinsic motivation stack before you properly develop your grit skills or your flow skills, whatever, you'll still get the job done. But what we now know is, oh my God, all this stuff is linked together. It's designed to work in a specific order in a specific sequence. And if you get it working in the order it's been designed to work in, you get farther, faster with a whole lot less fuss. And that's the big deal.

That's what's overlay that to even build. Wait, let me ask this. Can you define what is peak performance for people? Take an everyday person like me that I'm writing, speaking, training, coaching.

What was the way I explain it in the book was called Art of Impossible. What do I mean by impossible? I make a distinction in the early pages of book between capital I impossible and lowercase I impossible. Capital I impossible. These are the people I studied. These are people who did that which has never been done before.

You were looking at physically in the beginning or.

Well, I was looking at everything from like my beat as a journalist. I was a tech writer off. So I had A list of 35 science fiction ideas, bionics, robotic, on and on and on. And the minute they became science fact, I was in the room. First private spaceship that ever was launched. I was at the launch. The first time bionic eyes were ever developed and installed. I was in the room when they were the blind were allowed to see again, blah, blah, blah.

So that was making the idea that was impossible manifesting in physical reality. An idea, okay, an idea.

So that's what I, who I studied to write, to report the book. The book is meant to be used by anybody who's interested in lowercase I impossible. Lowercase I impossible is those things you think is impossible for you, stuff you don't believe you're capable of. So simple example, I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. I wanted to be a writer maybe from the time I was five or six years old. It's a blue collar Steel mill town in the 1970s. I don't know how to become a writer. I don't know any writers. I don't write. It's like I woke up one day and mom, dad, when I grow up, I want to be an elf. No, a hobbit. I want to be a hobbit, right? Like, nobody could tell me how to become a writer or anything else like that. There's no books, there's no Internet. Meaning when I talk about lowercase high impossible, there's no clear path between point A where you are and point B where you want to go. Statistically not great odds of success. Other lowercase high impossibles, rising out of poverty, overcoming trauma, getting paid for what you love, becoming world class at anything, becoming a successful entrepreneur or artist. These are all lowercase I impossibles. And because peak performance is nothing more or less than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us, the same set of skills that you will use to accomplish capital I impossible you'll use to accomplish small I impossible. And for those people listening who are like, dude, that's fine. I'm just trying to get through Monday, right? Like, that's three kids. I got three kids, my job is hard Monday and turns out doesn't matter because it's just your biology. So the skills are the same. So however far you want to go with this, that's in a sense, I'm not defining peak performance because it's whatever it means to you, wonderful in a sense, because the tools are the same and you can take it as far as you want. And I'll. Well, let me emphasize this point one more way, which is to say almost nobody I've met in 30 years of doing this work who accomplished capital I impossible set out to do that. I know one person, my friend Peter Diamandis, who I've co written some books with, created the X Prize. Peter set out to unlock the space frontier and did. He's the only person I know who as a teenager set himself this capital I impossible goal and did it. Most everybody else, it's small I impossible until after small I impossible until small I impossible until capital I impossible is just what's next. And let me give you an athletic example of what that really means. So I remember I met Laird Hamilton, big wave surfer, often considered one of the, like, the greatest athletes on the planet. I met him way back in the late 90s, 90s, he had just turned 30, I was like 26 or 27, and Laird was towing into waves at Jaws, surfing 50, 60 foot waves. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. It was the most, it, the craziest impossible anybody in action sports had seen up to that point. And I remember talking to him about it and he said, you know Steven, people see me on a 50 foot wave and they think, no way dude, that's impossible. And he's like, okay, I hear that, I understand where they're coming from. But you know what, I'm 30 years old on that wave and that's what they're looking at. They didn't see me at 3 years old on a 3 foot wave or 4 years old on a 4 foot wave or 5 years old on a 5 foot wave. And they didn't even see me last week on a 49 and a half foot wave. So they look at 50ft and they think, oh my God, that's impossible. I could never do that. And yet all the progression is completely invisible to you. And you're only looking at the finished product and you're making a judgment and it's the wrong judgment is his point.

Well, isn't that what everyone does on Instagram and you know, wherever YouTube, they see the huge success. I mean, not that I'm equating myself at all to that, but I will get people every day saying, I see what you've done on LinkedIn or whatever, can you give me some tips? And of course there are tips, but they, nobody sees the incremental. Years and years and years of millions of steps of doing something right.

I always tell people. So the, there's, if you go through the. The art impossible is literally 30 years of research turned into a playbook, right? It's broken down to how to step by step by step. There's a bunch of onboarding stuff you have to line up. Intrinsic motivation, there's some goal setting process, there's a bunch of stuff to get into the game that you got to do. But at the end of the book, when you're all said and done, when you look at what is required for peak performance, it's roughly six things to do every day, about seven things to do every week. And most of the things during the day that you're doing, they're either like five minute little short things or they're sort of like you're going to do your own work inside of this framework and just do it in a certain way, meaning anybody can do it. The point though is exactly your point. Peak performance works like compound interest, right? It's a little bit today, it's a little bit tomorrow, it's a little bit the next day. I'll give you a really great example. So if you can line up all your intrinsic motivators. Big five intrinsic motivators are curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery. They're all pointing in the same direction and augmented with proper levels of goal setting. And there are three tiers of goal setting that it seems the human organism responds best to, et cetera, et cetera. And it was do all that. What you end up with is what I nickname in the book, the habit of ferocity. This is the lean in instinct. And what's important about this is you're going to recognize this most people whenever they encounter a challenge. And we did a survey a couple of years ago of business leaders and we found that after talking about I think it was like 250 that we talked to all CEOs of mid sized companies. How many challenges, how many big problems do you solve a day on average? How many times do you like something come up where you're like oh, I got to make a real decision. I got the average was 5. Five big challenges a day. Who knows if that number is accurate. But here's the what's interesting, if you have all your intrinsic motivators point in the same direction, but proper goal setting, when that challenges arise, peak performers are going to lean in immediately. They're going to just immediately start solving that problem. It's instantaneous. That's a habit of first you just trained yourself that you're just going to rise to the challenge anyways. So why bother dithering around? Most people have a fear response, right? A little bit of anxiety, oh shit, I got to deal with this problem. And they did there for five minutes. Maybe they're like, oh, I don't want to deal with this. So I'm going to get on Twitter, I'm going to Facebook, I'm going to call my mom, I'm going to call my wife, anything to feel better. And then they go solve the problem. And let's say the difference is five minutes a problem. That's all probably more, but let's just say it's five minutes problem on average seven, five problems a day. That's 25 minutes back you're getting a day, it's three and a half hours a week you get back. But it's three and a half weeks a year of time that you actually get back. So one of the things that people say all the time is you just said it earlier. They look at peak performers and they're so far ahead, they're like, well, how the hell did they get so far ahead of me? And the answer is, well, five minutes at a time. That's how they got so far ahead. That's how this works. That's what compound interest means. And what's really gratifying is what happens after months and months and months and months and years and years and years. Right. That's what the most interesting thing in the world is. I mean, the most reliable pleasure in the world is mastery, right?

I think so.

Little victory, little victory, little victory. The science is really clear. We love that more than anything else. And. And that's the ingredients for contentment, well being, and overall life satisfaction as well. Those little victories, plus regular access to flow, according to most everything that we know psychologically is what you mean by wellbeing or overall life satisfaction.

I want to ask you one more question, then I know you have to go. I want to dimensionalize what you're saying. I want to take this map that you've given us and overlay it to how I run my business. Because I will be in those moments of flow where I have solved a problem that I have chewed on for two years, and suddenly the answer's there. And then I move fast like the speed of light. Why the heck was I chewing on it? And so confused and, you know, swirling around for years. So I would love you to address this one thing. I believe that part, it's the emotion thing. Being the former therapist, part of why we don't move forward in those steps is that there's a conflicting emotion, fear, concern, or even worry that if I do have that success, something bad's gonna happen. So we can't even get into the flow. I think often. Do you see that in your research?

So flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. There are 22 known triggers. There are probably way more. And they all work the same way. They work by driving attention to the present moment. Flow shows up when all our attention is the here and now. So that's what the triggers do. They're accessible to everyone. What we do find, the only thing that tends to be block flow, in terms of what you're talking about, is anxiety can block flow.

Yeah.

And so, for example, positive psychology has been really clear on this. There are three if you want to be calm enough to perform at your best. There's what we talk about as the positive psychology basics. And on the cognitive anxiety side, we know the three best ways to combat anxiety is either a daily gratitude practice, daily mindfulness practice, or Daily exercise, and it's even five minutes for gratitude practice. 11 to 20 minutes of breath, of focused breath work. Right. For mindfulness or 20 to 40 minutes of exercise. And what we tell our clients is, under normal conditions, do one a day. Like, if everything is just normal, do one of these a day and you're fine. Crisis, Covid. Do two or three a day because your body's generating too much norepinephrine for you to be able to perform. Yes. Or drop in the flow. And it'll also block learning. So. And by the way, it'll also block creativity because the more fear in the system, the more logical we become. Also. So you pay a enormous performance benefit for excess anxiety. So one of the first things you do right, there's a physical side of the equation. You need to get seven to eight hours of sleep a night. You need good hydration, nutrition, and you need regular social support. Of course, that's just to get enough energy to perform at your best and then to lower the anxiety, perform at your best. It's mindfulness, gratitude, or exercise once a day. Gratitude may have. And interestingly, by the way, actually, both gratitude and mindfulness, flow follows focus. So mindfulness is focus training. So it serves as a flow booster. And gratitude. We did so the best neuroscientist on gratitude is Glenn Fox. He teaches at usc. Super bright guy. We've done a lot of research. We finished a study last year where we discovered that we know gratitude lowers anxiety, we know why it works in the brain and all that stuff. We did a study where we discovered that people with regular gratitude practices also have more access to flow, regular access to flow. So there's correlations also there. Some of that may just be off the anxiety. Some of it may have something else going on. We wanted to take a deeper look at that question, but Covid got in the way. So there is something, something until we can get back in the world.

Oh, I didn't mean to cut you off, Stephen. This is so incredible. I don't even know where to begin. Where can people learn? Where can they get your book? Where can they watch all your talks?

Where do we go for the book, the art? Amazon. Is your friend here for me? Stevencottler.com if you're interested in flow work, if any of this stuff is interesting. Flowresearchcollective.com is where to go. If you're interested in training with us. ZeroToDangerous.com that's our flagship flow training. We train about 1,000 people a month from kind of U.S. navy SEALs and members of the U.S. special Forces, through professional athletes, CEOs of all the Fortune 500 companies to, like, yoga moms from Indiana and insurance brokers from Iowa. So, like, we literally train everybody you could possibly imagine.

Do you feel like you've reached your peak performance in this work? It feels like you are put on this planet to do this work.

I feel. I. All I can tell you is that everything I do with my day is everything I've always wanted to do with my days. You know what I mean?

That's peak, man.

Yeah. I mean, like, I work as hard as I possibly can, and I do pretty much all the stuff that I, you know, always wanted to do. Took 50 years to. You know what I mean? To almost. To get it that. That far, but. And I. And it's a recent thing, by the way. Like, really recent. Past two to three years. I'm like, okay, finally the research is at the place where I wanted to be that, you know, all that stuff. So. Long slow haul if I'm there. Long slow haul.

So inspirational. Steven, my gosh, I'm riveted. Come back again with your hundredth book, which will be next week. So grateful. I have so many questions, but obviously you've got another podcast lined up. Thank you again, people, please. Stephen's too busy to answer you, I think, but wherever you see this, maybe not. Please write your question, write your challenge. It's all there in this book. It's all there on Steven's website. Get the training. I think almost everyone I meet in some way or another wants to fulfill their highest potential and has very little idea how to do it. And I think this is a first wonderful place to start. So we hope you're inspired. We'd love to hear from you. And thank you again, Stephen. All the best in your amazing work. Have a wonderful, brave week, everyone, and we'll see you next time.