Achieve Extraordinary Things with Flow

Peak performance aging in a single sentence? Don't retire. I've spent my entire sort of career covering these extraordinary moments, right? The impossible becomes possible. Everybody I've seen who's done these extraordinary things, none of them started out extraordinary. They just start out like you and me, and it's the regular application of the same sort of core principles and flow day after day, week after week, that that's the road to impossible. The thing about flow that I always point out to people is like, It's available to all of us. It's our biology. Makes you 500% more productive, 700% more creative, and increases strength and stamina and cuts learning times in half. So that's available to each and every one of us. So what the hell are you gonna do with that? And I just think after 30 years of studying this stuff, we are all capable of so much more than we know. So if you really wanna stave off Alzheimer's and cognitive decline, couple things are really key. One of them is what does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game? Like never before. What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm I'm your host, Ryan Doris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

All right, guys, we're live. It's Justin Stenstrom from EliteLifePodcast.com, and today's guest is Stephen Kotler, the New York Times bestselling author of multiple books. Including The Art of Impossible, which is a book that I read, the last book, but he actually just come out with a new one. What's the new one called, Stephen?

In Our Country: Growing Old, Staying Rad.

Awesome. Yeah, it's, it's an incredible take on things. I haven't dived, I haven't dove into it yet, but it's something I'm gonna tackle in the probably upcoming weeks when I get a little bit more time. But here we are today, so I get to pick your brain on that subject as well and get a sneak peek into it.

Cool. Let's do it. Yeah.

Awesome, man. I, I've gone through your background a little bit and it seems like you've been a guy who's been doing this for a while with peak performance, peak functioning, superhuman type of ideas about achieving like optimal function as a human being. How did you get into that field and why has it been a focus of a lot of your books?

So, I started out as a journalist. It was my early career. And journalism is this really cool career where, you know, you essentially, if you can write, and I could write, you can get paid to be curious. And I was, I've always sort of been curious about, about people in general, and even performance in general. So that was a long time like that. I think that was born that way, just a little curious. What was happening in the early 1990s when I came in was neuroscience was getting involved. And I didn't love psychology. I didn't— like, the answers were too squishy. They were too subjective. They weren't reliable. They weren't repeatable. And when you moved into neurobiology, I had a sneaking suspicion that has 30 years of work has sort of confirmed this, and that this was mechanism, right? Like, shaped by evolution, the same in everybody, wasn't going to be— there wasn't going to be as much genetic variation. There wasn't going to be enough you know, early childhood experience variation. It was going to be that sort of stuff. So that was happening. Neurobehavioral neuroscience, which was— I was a new field then. And we were— what was cool about it is I was just a science guy, a science reporter, not covering it a lot. But in neuroscience, suddenly the field went from like talking about what is this cluster of neurons in this part of the brain doing to like, how do emotions work? How does consciousness work? What are altered states? What's flow? All that stuff we sort of started to be able to look at in the '90s. So that was part A. Part B, totally unrelated, was action sports. So I was fascinated, you know, I was a skier and a surfer and a climber and a lot of those things. I was— there weren't— this was early 1990s, so action sports are like these deep punk rock subculture. Um, I'm a weirdo punk rocker, so they're, they're happy to let me into their tribe. I'm an action sport athlete, they're happy to let me into their tribe. And they wouldn't do that with a lot of other journalists. So I was covering these sports, and if you know anything about the '90s in action sports, it's often referred to as the era of impossible. Because more impossible feats, things that had never been done in history and were not supposed to be humanly possible, got done than ever before. And this was in sport after sport after sport after sport. And it was wild. It's the kind of the most unprecedented flowering in human potential athletically anybody's ever seen. And it was happening in action sports. And so that caught my attention, right? You just like, because it's really one thing when you see somebody do the impossible on a screen, right? And it's Laird Hamilton, he surfs a 50-foot wave or whatever. But when you go drinking with your buddies on Friday night, And then on Saturday morning, everybody wakes up and goes into the mountains together, hungover and tired. And then your friend does something that for all of recorded history is supposed to be impossible. It's a totally different experience. And what made it even stranger is, as you probably know from your background in peak performance, especially in the '90s, what we thought about was the rules of peak performance back then. Have a great childhood, have the right mom, go to the right schools, have the right co— like all that nature nurture stuff was the formula. And these athletes, the people I was spending all my time with, Most of them came from broken homes and had terrible childhoods. Most of them had very little education, no money. These communities were like high in risk-taking and high in substance abuse. Normally, if you put that together in a community, people die young and go— they go to jail. What they do not do is reinvent what's possible for the human species. So that's what I was seeing up close. And that's where all this started for me was, holy crap, what's going on? Why is this happening? Where is it going? And so I just started, I started with the athletes and then I just branched, took this question, what does it take to achieve the impossible? Possible into every domain imaginable. So I just went from anything I was interested in. I went from action sports into technology into business into science into creativity and the, you know, anywhere we see the impossible become possible, I tried to be in the room. I tried to figure out why is this happening.

That's awesome. I love that. It starts all really from a curious mind, which is how the world changes when you think about it. Like all these great reinventors and innovators, they all have this curious mind to see things a little bit differently and understand how they can get to the next level. Like, Bannister's 4-minute mile, that changed everything. And they often talk about that in entrepreneurial circles too, is like, that's like the ceiling that, that broke, the glass ceiling. Once that was broken, everybody—

Yeah. But the Bannister effect, right? Yeah, exactly. It's called the Bannister effect. Yeah. And yeah, you said action sports was the, probably the greatest example of this. In fact, when I write about action sports in my book, The Rise of Superman, there's this quote from Jeremy Jones that snowboarder, who was talking about early days in Alaska. He's like, he's like, you got to understand what it was like to be there. Because there were these rules in action sports that had been there since the beginning of time, like, don't do this or you'll die. And they were getting broken on like a daily, sometimes an hourly basis. And to have like a front row seat to that, it didn't make any sense. Like it was the journalists, the reporters, we would talk about it, we'd be like, God, this, how's this possible? Can't keep going. They're this is the ceiling, right? And then the next year would be so much farther on. And eventually I was like, okay, wait, I've got all these neuroscience tools and I've got, you know, let's put them together and see what we can learn.

So what are some of the things, what are some of the habits? You mentioned that a lot of these people that you studied, they had, um, counterintuitive backgrounds, like you would— they would be the opposite of what you would think a successful person would have. But I'm sure a lot of them had similarities in some ways, habits, uh, different things that they did. Different ways that they thought or looked at the world? What were some of the commonalities?

So let's back it up one step. Let's— let me, let me define two. Let me talk about peak performance first for a second. Let me talk about flow for a second, then let me answer your question for a second.

All right.

So when I define peak performance, right, all I define it as is getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. This is, by the way, not a new definition. William James, godfather of American psychology, said something very similar in the, in the very first psychology type of book ever written back in 1901. So it's an old idea. It's not, it's not new. At the heart of that biology, whenever we see the impossible become possible, you see the peak performance state of flow. Flow, I mean, by definition, flow is optimal performance when we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, it refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. We get so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you're doing that everything else just melts away. Action awareness merge, sense of self diminishes, time will pass strangely. You get so sucked into what you're doing that 5 hours go by in like 5 minutes. And throughout, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. Right? And the uptick is enormous depending on, you know, all kinds of different— the Department of Defense found soldiers in flow learn 240% to 500% faster than normal. McKinsey found that CEOs in flow are 500% more productive than normal work that we did at the Flow Research Collective and done at Harvard and the University of Sydney found that in flow we are 400 to 700% more creative and innovative. And the list just keeps going on and on. There's physical function, there's, there's, there's a whole bunch of stuff. So flow is underneath peak performance and that's what I was seeing. So when I was talking to all these athletes in all these sports and when I left, that was the wild thing. 'Cause in the beginning, flow was this term in psychology that very few people were familiar with. I was, when I was starting out, I wasn't familiar with the term. We were talking about being in the zone or being, But they kept saying the same. It didn't matter where I went, I'd hear the same stories because flow has core psychological characteristics, things that define the state. We know we're in flow when there's complete concentration on the task at hand, where there's this diminishment in our sense of self, the voice in our head gets really quiet, right? Time distortion. There isn't— we don't experience peak performance on the inside. We experience two things. First, we get a sense of control. I can control things I can't normally control, right? And then second, we get euphoria and joy and So this is how psychologists and we measure flow and determine, are you in flow? And we measure those characteristics. And so those are commonalities. So it didn't matter where I was going. I was taking my question into scientists who were turning, like, creating bionics or artificial intelligence. And you would talk about their discoveries and where it came from. They would describe these states of flow where they had their ideas raining down on them versus the athlete saying, Oh yeah, I would get it. So answer to your question, what changed in the '90s is I have to take this one step further. Flow states have triggers. You want more flow? We work at the Flow Research Collective, my company, right? We're a research and training organization. We train people in 130 countries. And at the basis of our training are, it's just sort of a simple neurobiological idea is if you want more flow, flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. There are about 27, 28 that have been discovered. There's way more out there. That's what we've found so far. And flow follows focus. It only shows up when all our attention is here and now. That's what the triggers do. They drive our attention to the present moment, right? They do it a bunch of different ways neurobiologically, but they just drive attention to the present moment for a variety of reasons. In the '90s, in action sports, all of these triggers not only started to get very imported into action sports— I'll give you the big one. So prior to the '90s, the only way to win in action sports, you were the fastest guy to the bottom, right? Like skier, fastest man or woman to the bottom of the hill, they won. In the '90s, with action sports, suddenly creativity is a value, it's a virtue. It's the most creative line, self-expression, that— and creativity becomes this core action sports virtue. If you go back to the '90s, nobody talks about themselves as athletes. They talk about themselves as artists painting the canvas of the mountain or painting the canvas of the wave. And that's, that's the language of the time. Creativity, it turns out, is a flow trigger. When we link ideas together for the first time, right? We fill out a crossword puzzle, get a little rush of pleasure. That's dopamine. Dopamine is a focusing chemical. It makes us happier, but it also drives attention. So same thing happens when you look at a terrain feature and go, oh wow, that's a gentle rise. I can use it to throw a nose butter 360 kind of thing, right? That's pattern recognition. And that suddenly this thing was— they became the core virtue in action sports. So a lot of different things happened, but the main thing that happened is by unlocking creativity, by tapping into this sort of playful creativity, um, they were getting so much more access to flow. And it just starts feeding on itself. Risk is another flow trigger, right? So you got creativity on one end and risk on another, and novelty is another one, and unpredictability, which the natural world is packed with. And what happens— what starts to happen is these Flow triggers start stacking on top of one another in these communities. And you see this whenever you see this community of innovation. This is not just, this is the action sport athletes in the '90s, but I'm also talking about Silicon Valley during the internet boom, right? I'm also talking about like Paris in the '20s and, you know, Harlem in the '30s and take your pick. Whenever you see a, like a huge flowering of creativity, that's what you're seeing. 'Cause that's how the biology works.

Okay. That's amazing. How do you actually, how have you measured the fact that these triggers have put somebody into this flow state that you call it? And like, have you done say SPECT scans or MR functional MRI scans or do you just know based off performance?

Yeah. The, so the work I, the work I have, have done for, you know, 30 years has been on the neurobiology of flow at the Flow Research Collective. We, we're a training organization. We're also a research organization. So we, we do neuroscience studies with folks at Stanford and USC and UCLA and UC Davis and University of Miami and 10 other institutions. And we look at the neurobiology of peak performance of what's going on in the brain and the body. And in fact, recently, we, myself and my chief science officer, Dr. Michael Menino, along with a handful of other scientists published a paper in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, where we looked at what happens in the brain at every level as we transition into a flow state. It was the first complete picture of what happens in the brain as we transition to a flow state. The work has been done in everything. I mean, like everything back in my mentor Andy Newberg back in like early, late '90s was doing SPECT scans. So single positron emission technology where they're injecting radioactive dye and freezing the brain, right? Like back then, there's been MRI work, there's been a lot of EEG work. Um, uh, there's been some transcranial magnetic stuff where they're knocking things out or stimulating other stuff. We have a pretty good picture of what's going on in the brain and flow. And, um, so I can, I can speak to all of it if you want, and I can go into crazy techie detail if you want. But yeah, we've, there's a lot of that work has been done. It, uh, uh, we still don't have And where I'm hoping this is gonna change, we've got an upcoming study that I hope is gonna change all this. The hardest thing is like, what's the best model for flow? A lot of times people use video games to drive people into flow. Now there's lots of— reading is one of the most common flow states on Earth. So they've been reading studies. But some people do weird stuff where it's like math studies and I'm like, are you sure that math equations are driving people into flow? Because, you know, same thing with video games. I'm like, you know, I'm not a gamer. So I don't get into flow playing games. I can enjoy games every now and again. I've played games over the years because I've written some video games and I've participated in that world a little bit. I'm familiar, but it's not my favorite flow state. But for folks who are into it, it's incredible. So I wonder about the paradigms we're using to run the experiments. And we're working on the most immersive VR base jumping. Or wingsuit flying simulation, uh, and, and, uh, it's, it's very flowy. It's a very— and so we're hoping that this is going to get us past that problem.

Yeah, so I'm sure it's different too for everybody. Like, some gamer might be in the flow when he games, and somebody else when they play guitar might be in the flow, and someone else when they're writing a book might be in the flow. So you might have to individualize it a little bit more, but I'm sure you're figuring that out for sure. Um, It is very interesting though to— so when you do these upcoming experiments, is it going to be able to tell you exactly like what's going on, say biochemically with like, I'm sure dopamine plays a big part in this as well.

Yeah. So I mean, I can, I can answer most of that for you now. So let me just give you an overview of what goes on in the brain and flow. Yeah. So also just, you, you probably know this, but if your listeners don't, if you wanna talk about the brain, you want to know really 4 things, right? You want to know neurochemistry and neuroelectricity or brainwaves, because that's the two-way the brain talks to itself and sends messages back and forth. And then you want to know neural anatomy and networks, where things are located in the brain, because things are very rarely in one place. You get networks, right? So those are the 4 things you want to talk about. We've known for a long time from just a simple neural anatomy standpoint. As we move into flow, one of the coolest things that happens is large portions of the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that's right behind your forehead, deactivate. It's called temp, transient hypofrontality. Now it's known as localized transient hypofrontality. We used to think the whole prefrontal cortex turned off. Now we believe it's certain areas depending on what you're doing. So you said it's a little individualized. It is based on what you're doing. And, but so why does time pass so strangely in flow? One of the reasons is time is calculation performed all over the prefrontal cortex. That's like a network effect. And when the network starts to go down, we lose the ability to separate past from present from future. We're plunged into this deep now, this eternal elongated present that defines flow. Same thing happens to our sense of self. Why does our sense of self diminish as we go into flow and bodily awareness and all that and voice in our head? It's because self is another— it's all over the brain, but it's a lot of activity in the prefrontal cortex, another network effect. And as the network starts to crumble, our sense of self disappears. And this is all about efficiency. The brain needs a lot of energy for focusing on what's right in front of you on the task at hand. So it starts to shut down non-critical structures and it repurposes the energy for attention. That's why one of the main reasons this happens. So that's at a neuroanatomical level, right? What's going on at a network level? You see coactivation. Sometimes there's an argument, is it synchrony or metastability? Those are crazy complex terms. And that's not to ask, but let me just tell you, there's an argument still here. Between the goal-directed network, so motivation, and the cognitive control network, the network that allows us to stay focused on the task at hand. They are either— they're coactivating at the same time. Are they synchronous? Are they metastable? We're not quite sure. There's data in both directions. So that's neuroanatomic and neural networks. To what you said, neurochemically, flow dumps all 5 of the most potent pleasure chemicals and reward chemicals and performance-enhancing chemicals the brain can produce into our system at once. You get norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin and anandamide and endorphins. Huge cocktail. Just on the— let's just talk about pleasure and happiness and joy. Romantic love work by Helen Fisher at Rutgers shows that it's predominantly the neurochemicals norepinephrine and dopamine mixed together. That's romantic love. Now we love that feeling, right? One of the best feelings on earth is falling in love. Flow is those two pleasure chemicals plus three more. So when we say, you know, flow underpins happiness and wellbeing and overall life satisfaction, psychologists now have three different definitions definitions of happiness based on the levels you can achieve. Flow is built in part of the definition of the top 2 levels. That's how important it is to kind of overall human well-being. So these neurochemicals are a large reason why these certain neurochemicals— why does creativity go through the roof in flow, right? So, or learning. Learning is easier. Learning goes through the roof in flow, right? I said that the soldiers in flow in studies run by the Department of Defense learn 240% to 500% faster than normal. It's because quick learning shorthand for how learning and memory work in the brain. The more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, the better chance it'll move from short-term holding into long-term storage. It's one of the things neurochemicals do. They tag experiences as important, save for later, right? Flow is this huge neurochemical cocktail. So we tend to remember what happens to us in a flow state. I'll stop there. And this is a lot. I can keep going.

That's a lot. That's great though. So you mentioned that it is one of the top 2 levels of happiness. Is there something else that is above it or?

No, there's nothing any above it. So just briefly, there's happiness, which is how do you feel right here, right now? And flow can impact that. It can raise our mood and whatever. But as a general rule, we have these things called emotional set points that show up really early, sometimes by between 9 and 12, and nobody knows exactly where they come from, but we basically live our lives between the bandwidth. This is as bad as we're we're going to feel. This is as good as we're going to feel. Life takes place in between. We know you can lower them a little bit. Uh, death of a child, chronic unemployment will lower it, uh, and regular access to flow or certain other altered states, meditative states, can raise it over time. But it's pretty fixed. So that's level 1 happiness. Level 2 is engagement, which is basically a high-flow lifestyle where the thing that is producing the most flow for you is aligned with your goals. The highest we get to feel, the best we get to feel. And again, this comes down to feel-good neurochemistry, and I explain why in second is purpose. Purpose is when, like, you know, basically, like, we can take our goal-directed flow, engaging mission and tie it to something bigger than ourselves. And the bonus is, at level 1 of happiness, it's really sort of dopamine, serotonin, those kinds of— maybe a little norepinephrine. Level 2 is a lot of those chemicals, but you don't have any of the prosocial chemicals because you don't have other people in the equation. So you're not getting enough endorphins or oxytocin, these other really good feel-good reward chemicals. Once you get purpose, you get access to the full suite of all the feel-good reward chemicals. So that's why when you have a high flow lifestyle and the thing that's creating flow is aligned with your purpose, it's the best we get to feel on the planet. That's really, you know, a lot of what we mean by meaning and purpose. Meaning, you know, the other ingredient seems to be success in long-term projects. Is it like meaningful long-term? Like I worked 2 years to like, you know, drive a taxi and put myself through grad school, that kind of thing. Well, we seem to remember that and stack that. And so what meaning and purpose, the combination of those 2 things seems to like add up into like what we'd call life satisfaction, those sorts positive qualities.

Yeah. So like in that example right there, after the 2 years, you would actually sustain a higher level of satisfaction, purpose, happiness, despite the fact that the actual event is over. Like you carry that with you going forward.

You carry, you carry more meaning, right? Like that's sort of like, and what you really carry is the knowledge that you did something long and hard and that knowledge that you're capable of long and hard makes makes you feel safer, and that translates into happiness. That's where the, the loop is. Those long projects, those— I, you know, I triumphed over this, this hard thing. I succeeded, right? Part of it is it makes us feel safe, more capable as humans, and much safer. And that has a really big impact on happiness.

I wonder why safer. Just going back to, you know, primordial days when we're running around from from lions and tigers and trying to keep safe that way.

Well, I mean, when I say safer, what I'm really talking about is levels of norepinephrine in the brain.

Yeah.

Right. A little bit is good. A little bit is curiosity and excitement, and too much is anxiety and unpleasantness. And so when I say safer, like, threat level is like how much or how little norepinephrine is gonna be in our system. That's really what I'm talking about. And that has huge downstream impacts.

Okay. So just, it's just to put you in a place where that it balances out that right amount of norepinephrine.

Yeah, basically. So everything, there's a sweet spot for flow known as the flow channel sits between, it's the challenge skills balance of flow trigger that says we pay the most attention to the task at hand, has the greatest chance of driving us into flow when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you wanna stretch but not snap emotionally. That's like the midpoint between boredom, there's not enough stimulation here, I don't care. And anxiety, whoa, way too much. Like, like, right? And in between is the flow channel, or what physiologists— you're probably familiar with the Yerkes-Dobson curve. It's the same exact— this is the same thing we're talking about. And there's a sweet spot for all performance, right, that we talk about as the flow channel. But it's a sweet spot where, you know, too much, too little. And this is why— so one of the reasons why there are certain peak performance basics that we talk about, uh, for ex— and one of them is you have to like keep your nervous system in check. You have to do a daily stress relief matters. So whether it's a mindfulness practice or gratitude practice or regular exercise, right, are the 3 big guns. But you gotta lean into one or more of those on a daily basis because you have to keep norepinephrine levels low so that when a challenge shows up, it's— it stays a challenge and doesn't become a threat. Once it's a threat, all kinds of performance things plummet, right? We want it in that challenge sweet spot.

I wonder, do you work with MMA guys at all? Boxers, fighters of any sort?

Like, we do work with— we do. I mean, we do a lot of work. I mean, every— we work with spec ops a lot as well. And, and, and actually the military, we train the San Francisco Police Department and the Air Force and things like that. We do a bunch of stuff with MMA fighters. And in and around this zone, right? Action sport athletes more. But we've done, we, we have worked with sort of everybody at this point.

Yeah. It just seems like it'd be a big factor in a, in a fight, you know, like get the adrenaline going, the norepinephrine going. Like you said, you want the right amount, but if you have too much, you're gonna get too much anxiety.

Well, this is, so this is, yeah, this is why, so in a fight, this is the army maxim, Train as we fight, fight as we train. It's this same problem. So when we learn skills, it's 3 levels. Cognitive is the first level. I'm constantly thinking about what I'm doing, right? Then associative, okay, parts of it is already unconscious and I got it, and parts of it I got to think about. And then unconscious, right, where we could just do it automatically. Fear, spike in fear knocks you down a level. So the reason, you know, Mike Tyson You know, can say that like you, you never know how you're gonna react in a fight until you get punched in the face. And the reason the Army says, you know, fight how you train, train how you fight is so you get used to this and you, you got this. The secret is like knowing you're gonna get knocked down a level and still being able to maintain that challenge skill sweet spot. Right? So like that's the sort of peak performance challenge, which is cool and tricky.

Yeah. I'm sure like a lot, like Mike Tyson, for instance, or some of these top level boxers, you know, that sparring plays a big part in getting their mindset right to, to feel that feeling of, all right, I just got hit, I just got knocked down, now how do I get back up when this happens in a real fight?

Um, just from my own, you know, minor, you know, 3 or 4-year experience in martial arts, um, for sure, right? Um, it's because it just calms you down, but that's Well, that's just deliberate practice in a sense, right? That's the— deliberate play is a much better strategy for performance than deliberate practice. It just gets much better results over time if you're trying to develop expert skills. But when you're trying to conquer a fear thing, deliberate practice, just do the same thing but an inch more and an inch more over and over and over again. Doesn't matter the sport. You could be talking about, you know, action sports. You could be talking about combat sports. It really in those high stress situations that, you know, it's really useful there.

What do you mean by deliberate play versus deliberate action?

Practice. These are just two, so two old ideas out of peak performance. So Anders Ericsson, who's very famous in the peak performance world, the late Anders Ericsson, or Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the 10,000 hours to mastery. That was an error-ish based on something Anders Ericsson wrote, um, about deliberate practice. Deliberate practice was for a very long time considered the royal road to skills mastery, and it's do the same thing over and over, repetition with incremental advancement, right, in very tight window. So it turns out, uh, that that is really good for acquiring very narrow window of skills. Certain skills it lends perfect. If you want to become a concert violinist, that's the way, right? That's a really great way to get there. Um, but most other situations, deliberate play, which is repetition without repetition— so do the same thing you did before and just improv a little on top of it— um, tends to outperform deliberate practice. And for one simple reason: deliberate practice— so we that dopamine reward chemical. Deliberate practice, only one way. If you did the exact thing you did before and pushed a little bit further, you're going to get your dopamine reward. Deliberate play, as long as you don't do the exact same thing you did before and you improv a little bit in any direction, you're going to get a dopamine reward hit. So one, way more motivated as you go along because there's way more possibilities for being right and you just get more neurochemicals. Play also releases a lot of endorphins. So you end up with these way more neurochemicals it leads to much better skills acquisition and better, even better with play because there's no shame, no self-consciousness, and it's lighter and all that stuff. There's less norepinephrine in your system when there's, with deliberate practice, I, I've got this tiny little thing where I can only get it right. There's a lot more, so it's a lot harder to get into flow. It's, it's more difficult. So deliberate play tends to outperform deliberate practice. Strategy for mastery.

Can you give an example, like a real example of what deliberate play looks like in a, in a situation or a skill?

Yeah, I'll give you, I'll give you a total. I'll give, so my new book in our country is about a bunch of ideas that sort of come out of peak performance flow science, peak performance aging that basically said all the science has said old dogs can't learn new tricks. There's a whole bunch of new science that says that's wrong. And it was very true in the lab. I wanted to know, was it true in the real world? So I took it and I decided to see if I could use it to teach myself how to park ski in my 50s. Now park skiing, it's a discipline in skiing that involves doing tricks off jumps and on rails and boxes and wall rides. It's acrobatic as hell. It's very dangerous. And for about 11 to 15 different biological reasons, depending on how you count, it's supposed to be considered like, it's very difficult to learn if you're over 35. By the time you get to 45, it's impossible. And once you get over 50, people just think you're fucking nuts, right? And so I tried to learn at 53, and, uh, it was very— we were very successful, and it worked. We took a deliberate play approach. It was part of what we, what we did. And it's complicated, but there was very little formal instruction, um, and I, uh, I had a ski partner who was a better skier than I with a little bit of park skiing background. I had non-zero no tricks, and I would play follow-the-leader game and sort I would follow him around the mountain. He'd find a feature and throw a trick off of it, and I would— if I had the trick, I would try to throw the same trick. If I didn't, I would try to use the same motion he used in just a playful, creative way. Why? Because playful creativity and the reinterpretation of a terrain feature is a flow trigger. So if I did a bunch of that stuff in a row, it's going to drive me into flow. Flow massively amplifies pattern recognition, fast twitch muscle response, strength, stamina, blah, all this other stuff that's gonna make learning how to park ski that much easier. So we use this deliberate play learning style as I would follow him around the mountain rather than like him going off a jump and me trying to do exactly what he did and over and over and over again. Instead, it was a constantly flowing improv.

Thank you for tuning in to Flow Research Collective Radio. And please pardon the brief interruption. I've got a question for you. Do you have great ideas and big goals? My assumption is you have more skills than most knowledge workers. You're paid well to use your brain, and you've reached this level in your career by being uncommonly effective at what you do. But maybe something's changed. You're typically relentless, but fatigue has started to slow you down. You used to be crystal clear on your priorities, but mounting responsibilities have started to blur your vision. Now, on your best days, You can focus for hours on end on the most critical tasks and blaze through a massive workload with ease. But perhaps you're inconsistent. Some days you can barely focus for more than a few minutes before your attention gets yanked elsewhere. People rely on you, so you're constantly reeled into conversations, task switching, and multitasking. Or perhaps you've got no trouble keeping focus. You can consistently execute on your highest priorities, and you're fully able to manage your time wisely. But you know that something is missing. You're looking for a way to perform perform at your absolute best, and not just some of the time, but all the time. On your best days, you can get 10 times more work done in half the time, and it feels nearly effortless, and it's enjoyable, and it's energizing. At the end of a 10 out of 10 day, you hit the pillow that night feeling unstoppable. Now, this level of extreme accomplishment is its own reward, but you get the external rewards too by excelling in your profession and your craft. Now, with 10 out of 10 days, you exceed your own expectations and surprise yourself with what capable of. And if you've ever suspected there's a way to operate at a 10 out of 10 level every day, you're right, there is. And we're going to show you exactly how to access apex performance like this at will, without fail. To train with us at the Flow Research Collective, go to getmoreflow.com. That's getmoreflow.com. All the best.

Yeah, that makes sense. It, it also, uh, I feel like if they're trying to be more strict and just tell you a lot of things, it's a lot easier for most people to learn when you're actually doing it and having fun doing it too. Like, I think the fun part is actually a big part of it as well.

Huge.

Huge.

My, my, a, a good friend of mine, Catherine Price, wrote a great book called The Power of Fun. And that talks about like the role flow plays in fun and, and just its importance in learning. But it's a really big deal. It's a huge deal. For peak performance aging. Like once you get close into your forties, yeah. And beyond play is a critical ingredient in the system that sort of gets, you know, squelched out of the system and it's really important.

Yeah. So what, what are some of the tenets of peak performance aging? What are the, some of the things that you're looking at now as opposed to some of the other books?

So let me give you a high-level overview. And then let me give you peak performance aging in a single sentence, and then we can go and drill down anywhere you want to go. Okay. High-level overview is this. And by the way, for a bunch of different reasons, like my work in flow led direct— it leads directly into this. And it's not a lot of people in the field who started out wherever ended up— because flow appears to be the engine of adult development. It's the engine of maturity. It's because of this challenge-skill balance on the other side of a flow state. Our skills improve, right? We're more adaptive, we're more complex. And among the things that happens in flow, empathy increases, perspective increases, and wisdom increases. So that's maturity. That's literally an engine for maturity. So when you work on flow, everyone who's worked on flow has started to realize that it's one of the main drivers of development into adult development and later in life, and it stays sort of constant. And, um, Chick Settmeier once said, the godfather of flow psychology, because flow feels so good. He said flow is the trick that evolution created to get us to grow up, basically. And which is kind of true in an interesting way. Grow up and stay young at the same, at the same point. But so it all this came out of flow is my point. And a lot of what we've learned is you got to just start with the old idea about aging, the traditional idea. It's the long, slow rot theory is what I like to call it, right? This is the idea that our mental skills, our physical skills, they decline over time and there's nothing we can do to stop the slide, right? And some of those skills start declining. VO2 max starts declining in our 20s, you know what I mean? They start declining early, et cetera. And it turns out that that's not true. Partially true, but not actually true. What we now know is that while all those skills decline over time, they're all use it or lose it skills. So if you never stop training those those skills, we hang on to them, even advance them far later in life than anybody thought possible. So that, and there's massive amounts of science that show that. Now, that said, if you want to rock till you drop, what's peak performance aging in a single sentence? And I'll have to define some of these terms as we go along, but it's really this: you want to regularly engage in challenging social and creative activities that demand dynamic. And I'll have to define deliberate play. We just talked about what that is and take place in novel outdoor environments. That's literally peak performance aging in a single sentence. Now I can take it apart for you and explain what, what the different components mean. But the, the high-level thing that I wanna point to is whether you're talking about biohackers in their 20s or like guys in their 50s and 60s who are trying to hack longevity, you don't hear any of the stuff I just talked about, right? You hear all kinds of fancy biohacking this and take this supplement and inject this and, and, um, that's all maybe right, but everything they're talking about is like cutting-edge, brand new, speculative. We're not going to know if it fights aging and longevity for 30 years, but we've got 50 years of data that shows the thing I just gave you. If you really, really, really want to impact aging, that's the formula. And one thing, let me just give you a simple example of the dichotomy. So one of the big mindset we, we talked about briefly off the air right before we started. And so we positive mindset towards aging, which is literally like, I think the rest of my life is filled with interesting possibility, however long that is, right? I just, I think my, the best days are ahead of me. That translates to an additional 8 years of healthy longevity. That's astounding. That's astounding. And negative mindset towards aging, which we see expressed in people who grow up around negative ageism, is a widely held stereotype. And people who are exposed to negative stereotypes around aging obviously have a crap mindset towards aging. And so Becca Levy at Yale did this research, and she found that that if you're exposed to negative mindsets around aging and you, and you buy them and you buy into them in your 20s, 30s, and 40s, by the time you're 60, you'll have a 30% greater memory decline than those people who were not exposed to those negative stereotypes and had a better mindset. So huge. The mind-body connection is really neat when you get to sort of peak performance aging because you start to really see it at work. But I'll, I'll stop there. That's sort of, we can go wherever you want from there, but I'll just, I'll, I'll stop there.

There. There's a lot of good information there. Just real quickly, and then I wanna dive into, I wanna break down the actual one sentence that you gave of the high-level overview of what this all means. But just real quickly on, on what you mentioned, is it positive mindset translates to 8 years of, of a longer lifespan or just healthy lifespan?

Health lifespan and healthy lifespan. So you get 8 years and they're healthy years.

Wow.

It's right. So it's healthspan and lifespan is really what it boosts, which is very impressive. Yeah. Social, by the way, second component, right? We said we wanted to drill down. I said you want to radically engage in challenging, creative, and social.

Yeah.

Maintaining robust social connections over time translates into an additional 7 years of healthy longevity as well. Now, are those two things cumulative? We don't know yet. Right? There's some synergistic effect. It's probably not going to get you like 15 more years, right? But there's a synergistic effect there, um, that we're, we're, we got good at isolating the components. How they're working together, that's sort of the next puzzle, I think. Um, but, uh, so that's the social component. Challenge, make sure you stay, is what ensures that you stay in that challenge-skill sweet spot. And it's because flow is so important to peak performance aging. for a bunch of different reasons. But, and we can talk about why, but when we're in flow, it boosts the production of T cells that fight disease, and it boosts the production of natural killer cells, which fight tumors and other sick cells. It, resets the nervous system. So when we're in flow, stress hormones are flushed out of our system, and the nervous system gets reset to zero. There are 9 known causes of aging, biological causes of aging. What they all share in common is stress and inflammation. So anything that's an anti-stress stress medication, in a sense, is an anti-aging tool. And flow really resets the nervous system. So all these things play a really powerful role. So challenging, right? Creativity is interesting. So I gotta talk a little bit more. I gotta tell you one other cool thing about the second half of life. As we enter our late 40s and early 50s, contrary to the idea that, like, our brains rot over time, Um, as we enter our late 40s and early 50s, there's whole new levels of intelligence, wisdom, creativity, and empathy we start to access. It happens because in our 40s, the two halves of the brain start working together synergistically like never before. It actually starts in our 40s, starts to really get going in our 50s, and then peaks 60 through 80. So like, this spikes for a long time. And then the brain, usually in our late 40s also, it starts to recruit underutilized regions and build redundant networks and, and, and cull optimize them for new learning and things like that. And so we get access to like 3 new thinking styles and all this stuff that doesn't come online. And it's— these are really legitimate cognitive superpowers. So I talked about creativity. It's not just you get more creative. Divergent thinking, that's outside the box, far-flung connections between disparate ideas. It's the hardest aspect of creativity to train. It's really hard to train people in. And we get way more of it naturally because of how the brain evolves in our 50s than ever before. That's like the heart of innovation right there, entrepreneurship right there. And it's coming online naturally in our 50s. But here's something weird, that, that those skills have a bunch of moderators. There's stuff you want to do in your 30s, 40s, and 50s to, to unlock that in your brain. And in our 50s, creativity is the moderator. So it's creative activities and creative thinking styles that actually unlock the new levels of intelligence, that unlock all of these cognitive superpowers. Powers. And so that's where the creativity comes from in that clause. Also, creativity is a flow trigger. So you're unlocking these cognitive superpowers and you're getting more flow. So that's that part of the, of the equation. The next was dynamic deliberate play. We did deliberate play. Dynamic is a shorthand term. So I said all our physical skills decline over time. You want to train them. What does that mean? Means you want to train strength, stamina, agility, flexibility, and balance. Those Those are the 5 core functional fitness things that we gotta train over time 'cause they all fade. But if we train 'em, they stay up. It's a lot of training. World Health Organization has guidelines. If you want peak performance aging, like to really be at your best, it's 150 to 300 minutes of aerobic activity a week, 2 strength training days a week, and 3 balance, agility, and flexibility. If you're training hard, it's about 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, or you you find a single activity that combines all those things. When they all combine, that's a dynamic activity. So pickleball's pretty dynamic, skiing's really dynamic, you know, that sort of thing. And as a bonus, when we have dynamic activities, it stimulates— it doesn't just help our body, it also stimulates the birth of new neurons and new blood vessels in the brain. So you get like new blood to those new neurons, new neurons. So angiogenesis and neurogenesis are amplified by dynamic motion. So you get all these physical benefits from dynamic motion, and then you get all these cognitive benefits that stave off cognitive decline, right? So that's that portion. Novel outdoor environments is the last bit. Novelty is another flow trigger. When we're in novel environments, it focuses our attention. So it's important for that. Um, outdoor environments because it's two things that matter here. One, positive psychology has taught us that time in nature, for reasons I can go into if you want me to, lowers stress levels and amplifies serotonin, right? And will outperform most— 20-minute walk in the woods outperforms most of the SSRIs on the market for serotonin. Serotonin is a common chemical, boosts the immune system, does a lot of good overall. But this is an anti-stress right? So you've got outdoor environments that are de-stressing us. That's an anti-aging technology. And bonus. So if you really want to stave off Alzheimer's and cognitive decline, a couple things are really key. One of them is, you, as I mentioned before, you want new neurons and you want them to form new neural networks and synaptic plasticity. So the adult brain continues to birth neurons almost until we die, but most of them come out of the hippocampus. And the entorhinal cortex, which is the part of the brain that does long-term memory. It also does place. This is our map-making machinery. So the brain evolved. It's really important when you have, uh, where were you when you encountered that ripe fruit tree, or where was that cave where the tiger almost attacked you? Or that was survival for our ancestors. So remembering where you were when you had emotionally experiences in the outdoors is exactly what the brain is designed to do. It's exact. So if you have novel experiences in outdoor environments, you are amplifying the production of new neurons and new neural networks, and you're reinforcing, um, and staving off decline and other ones. So this, besides everything else, this is a formula that's helping you preserve brain function over time and, and birth new neural networks over time. So that's sort of the formula. It's, you know, you can, it's a, it's a sort of a hyper exact formula for lifelong learning is really what it is, right? It's an approach to learning and lifelong learning is at the heart. You hear this in Peak Performance Aging. It's the heart of there because the two best protections against Alzheimer's dementia and cognitive decline are expertise and wisdom. 'Cause they form really wildly redundant networks across the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that's most vulnerable. To cognitive decline. So anytime we're learning expertise, the skills, the tactics, the strategy, or wisdom, the emotional intelligence that might surround the skills, the tactics, and strategies, we are building these wildly redundant networks across the prefrontal cortex and backing it up. So this is everything, everything we're talking about here is sort of a formula for staying young and staving off kind of the worst that could become in forms.

Yeah, it seems like it all really ties into each other. And, uh, you know, even when you're talking about the 10,000-hour rule, which we thought for many years was true, or at least had a basis in truth, which it kind of does, but there's a better—

I mean, yeah, I mean, there's a better approach to it. Well, it's— I— so there have been 3 challenges to it, right? One was by Anders himself. He said, look, Malcolm chose an average, right? And he— that's— that was the problem with it, is he would it— you picked how long would it take somebody have to be playing to become a member of an orchestra, right? A leading orchestra. That was his. But if you ask the question, how long would it take to become first chair violinist in a leading orchestra? That would be 20,000 hours. So it's an arbitrary, right? It's arbitrary. And it's also, um, and this is all Anders. Anders said this. He also said it's very specific skill. Then David Epstein said, hey, wait a minute. Most people don't learn that way. They learn by sampling. It's not deliberate practice in one thing over and over. It's, I'm gonna go over here and taste this. I'm gonna go over here and taste this. I'm gonna go over here and taste this. I'm gonna mix and match over time until I have match quality. All my intrinsic motivators are lined up, and then I go. And that's actually how most people learn. And the third challenge came from me in Rise of Superman. And Anders and I had talked about this and laughed about it before he died. Where people learn faster in flow. So if you can get into, like, those action sport athletes, they got— a lot of them got to mastery faster than 10,000 hours because they spent so much time in flow. So you can shortcut it with this deliberate play, high-flow approach. And there were, you know, and it's not hard and fast. And, um, you know, and I, you know, and Malcolm himself, Gladwell, has said as much also, like, nobody's guilty here. He's trying like, you know, property has some really cool ideas. He did a great job with it. Um, and it got taken a little out of context because that's what happens.

Yeah, traditionally anyways. But yeah, it's a great book, it's a great, uh, idea. But, but I was getting at is that your approach seems to be a lot better when you combine the creativity factor. And it's one that not necessarily will benefit somebody at an older age, but somebody at any age. And as you get older, you continue to do that. And it also some of the things you mentioned, it really hammers home the point of retirement and people who retire. You see this over and over again. They retire, within a couple of years they die. They got nothing to live for. Brain shuts down.

I, I haven't said this. So, uh, I, so all this neuroscience that I based my shit on and, uh, you know, I ran a couple of really wild experiments and, and whatever, but like the neuroscience, there's 30 years, there's a guy named Daniel Levitin who's a neuroscientist at McGill University. You probably read his, you wrote a famous book, This Is Your Brain On Music. He wrote another book called, uh, The Organized Mind, which is amazing. And he wrote, uh, another book called Successful Aging. And his advice after— it's an 800-page book. It's all the gritty detail and all the, like, the same science I'm talking about. He, he sort of really breaks down in, in a lot of, uh, detail. But his— he's like, you know, want peak performance aging in a single sentence? Don't retire. That's his— don't retire. Yeah, it's sort of the, it's sort of the death knell for the brain, right? And, you know, this is sort of one of the things that we discovered is it really helps to have a mission when, for peak performance aging, like all, if all that gave you that big long sentence, but they're all pointing in the same direction and you're used, like my mission was to learn how to park ski. That was my mission. But those kinds of missions are incredibly, incredibly sort of, they're useful over time and they're older adults are better at them. They, they're sort of designed for like these long-term missions, like for whatever reason. And there's a lot of, um, they're very beneficial. So, uh, we're sort of built for it. And it's— I just find it, it's a, it's a great way to drive focus, and it's a great way to like stop yourself from quitting and, you know, all that, all that stuff. Um, I don't know how I got here, Justin. I'm gonna stop and let you ask another question before I go into tangent land some more.

This is great, man. It really is. I'm learning so much. Um, so, so I got— actually, I have a few questions I want to get back to because we're going to wrap things up in a few minutes, but I have a kind of a quick few things that I want to address. But just real quickly on what you just said, the missions thing. So is it just like, as you get older, you— it's good to have multiple missions in your life, like over and over? And once you complete a mission after like, say, 2 years, 5 years, whatever it takes, a year, you come up with something else? Because like, you need that to sustain you?

Yeah, I think— yeah, I think, I think it's really really important. Yeah, I, and I know I'm a bit— I said earlier that we were talking about meaning and like that. So missions, those kind of missions, they fold right into sort of what we mean by meaning also. And so it works to our advantage. But I like— for me, it came out of my career as a journalist, journalist, where I started to notice that like you gave me an assignment, and man, I'd go to a war zone, I would sail with pirates through months, I would do the craziest dumbest, most insane stuff because you gave me a mission, right? Like, are you— I mean, I was making it back in the day, like, 25 cents a word. You gave me a mission, right? Like, I'm gonna go to a war zone for 25 cents a word. Like, what? But I did, right? And if there's something about, like, our mentality, we're goal-directed creatures, humans are. And so we're sort of built for those kinds of missions in a sense. And I just try to take advantage of that internal machinery. But it really like it grew out of this like thing I noticed with journalism where I was like, oh my God, I will go so much farther if you just give me a mission. So I started trying to wrap these hard things I was trying to accomplish inside of that kind of thinking for this very reason.

Yeah, I actually think that having a mission, having a purpose is one of the biggest reasons why so many kids growing up like in their teenage— especially teenagers when they start to get in trouble— like that's one of the biggest reasons why they have their life all screwed up. That's why the biggest reason why all these people go to jail at a certain age and they commit crime and they, you know, get— go back, get thrown back into jail and they can't figure their life out is because they don't have that mission. Whether it was missing a mentor or, you know, a parent, whatever it is, it's a big part of who we are as human beings. And when we don't have that, we're really lacking just a purpose and, you know, what to do with ourselves.

Yeah. And, and, you know, I cover this in Art of Impossible. We definitely don't have time time. So this is just a teaser for the book, but like, there's something in the book called the Passion Recipe that teaches us how we turn curiosity into passion and passion into purpose. Because there's biology, like, this is— that's how we are better when we have a purpose. There's, you know, so much. And it's a flow trigger, right? Want more flow in your life? And we have a purpose, we focus way more on what we're doing, right? So the end result of a purpose is more flow, which is peak performance. You get farther towards your purpose, and it's this sort of virtual cycle. But it's, there's sort of a simple step-by-step way to get to it that anybody can get to a purpose that's in Art of Impossible. You can Google the passion recipe actually. And I, I think I wrote about it for a Forbes article that's just online for anybody.

Yeah. You mentioned a few of the triggers early, and this is where I wanna kind of just fire off a few of these rapid questions if you can. You mentioned a few of the triggers earlier, creativity, novelty, risk. We talked about some of these already. Is there any, you said there's 27 plus that you've identified. Can you just list a few others that we haven't touched on?

Yes. And I, I wish I was the one who identified all 27. No, no, no. A lot of people have identified. So something that I term though, this is probably a term is gonna go away in the end, but we call it deep embodiment. When you were engaged in multiple, when multiple senses are engaged in the same activity, we just pay more attention to that activity. right? So action sports really grab all over your 5 senses and you get vestibular awareness and proprioception, that sort of stuff. So that's, that can work as a flow trigger. Unpredictability will work as a flow trigger. Complexity will work as a flow trigger. When we encounter complexity like the night sky and, you know, we look up in the night sky and we're suddenly dealing with like geological time and like you're looking back in time and all those stars are actually galaxies And, you know, complexity can act as a— can drive focus in that way. The challenge-skill balance we talked about, immediate feedback. So when feedback is immediate, you don't have to wonder how you're doing. You automatically know. Sports are great for this, right? With tennis, serve is either in or out. That's immediate feedback, right? And it's one of the reasons sports are really flowy also is the immediate feedback. And then there's a— so there's individual flow, which is all the triggers we've been talking about. There's a shared version of a flow. State, which is known as group flow. It could be interpersonal flow, me and you in a conversation. We get so lost in conversation that like hours go by and we don't even notice, right? Group flow, a team and a fourth quarter comeback in football or basketball, or a communitas, which is flow at scale. You go to a rock concert, you just merge with the band and clapping and sync and everything. That's communitas. It's group flow at scale. So there are 16 or so triggers for group flow that start with like collective ambition. So if you want to trigger group flow, everyone in the group needs to share the same ambition and nobody can achieve it individually. So it's a collective ambition because the only way to get there is cohesively as a group. And then there's like individual flow triggers, risk becomes shared risk at the group level, that sort of thing. To just rattle off a handful of those.

Yeah. And I'm sure on that last point too, you're talking about like Navy SEAL teams or, you know, Super Bowl winning football teams. Like they're all in that same group. Yeah.

My book, I mean, in Stealing Fire, which is my, which is another book of mine, it opens with a, with a Navy SEAL story, right? Like, and, and with work we did with the SEALs because group flow is at the heart of how you do that, right? You can't really have an elite commando. Unit without group flow. That's how you do that. Yeah, but that's really how you do— I mean, that's, that's how you do entrepreneurship, right? That's a startup. That's, you know, that's any amazing team. Uh, so we do a lot of work, um, with surgeons, surgical teams, uh, lots of group flow, uh, in surgical team and great surgical teams. That's another really common place that shows up.

So what's the quickest way in the moment. Say you're going into a meeting, you know, you're just trying to sit down to get a paper written if you're in college, you're trying to do some work if you're at home working. What's the quickest, easiest way for someone to get into a flow state immediately without having to do an action sport or something else?

Yeah, no, I mean, so there's no one quick way. It's the triggers. Um, and remember, like, we've been talking about risk in action sports, so people are hearing physical Risk? No, no, no. Physical risk, social risk, emotional risk, intellectual risk, creative risk, spiritual risk, right? All right. The brain can't tell the difference between physical risk and social risk, right? Which is why fear of public speaking is the number one fear in the world, and not like something that would make evolutionary sense, like fear of getting eaten by a grizzly, right? No, it's public speaking because the brain can't tell the difference. So, um, this is not just a, just a sport thing. And, uh, what the hell was your question?

Quickest way to get into it?

Oh, because there is no, there's really, there's no one way. Everybody is different. So we, each of us have flow triggers we're more or less susceptible to that work better with us. What I can tell you is it's massively trainable. So at the Flow Research Collective, we, as I said, we, we train people and, um, we have an 8-week digitally delivered training and we're geeks. We measure everything. We train people, 130 countries. So we've got like in tens of thousands each month. So it's like globally diverse, wildly accurate. What works, what doesn't? Is this shit trainable? And all we're training people on— these are the triggers, these are how you use them, this is how, you know, that's what we're doing. We see a 70 to 80% boost in flow, um, on the back end of the training. So my point to everybody is this stuff is really trainable. That's just your biology at work. Like, our kung fu is good. Like, we know what we're doing and we know how to train people in this. But most of that huge uptick is just we're wired for this, and that's the leverage that's available to all of us when you start working with the triggers. But you have to sort of play with them, and it's so— it's different in different situations. So in other words, like, you as an athlete going into a fight, you as— or going into the gym, or going, you know, versus you as a— as business— different triggers in different rooms at different times of the day and everything else. The thing to remember, let's just start the most simple and basic one. Complete concentration is a flow trigger. Flow follows focus, right? If we can't pay attention to the task at hand, it's not gonna work. So if you're doing this individually, distraction management, turn off your cell phone, turn off email, turn off Instagram, and you know, everything else that's gonna— if you're writing, you know, for me, I write in focus view. So it's a Microsoft Word thing that just allows me to see the words. My cell phone's off. My, you know, door shut, my lights are off in my office. I write at 4 o'clock in the morning when nobody can disturb me, that sort of thing. But same thing, what group flow, you gotta wall off the team in, in the same way. And, um, I'll give you one extra weird tip. So how long should you try to focus and pay attention to maximize flow? So it turns out we have a number for that, whether it's individual or group flow, 90 to 120 I always tell people, start by starting like wall off your, your complete concentration time and start with like 10 minutes or 20 minutes. 'Cause flow, it's all amplified productivity. You get time back. But we have a built-in 90 to 110 minute focusing slot in the brain. We have a 90 to 110 minute, we go through a REM cycle, a sleep cycle, and that's right. So we have a sleep cycle. We also have a focus and waking cycle that maps onto that same timeframe. So it's really easy because the brain has this slot for it to train yourself to focus for about like 90 to 110 minutes because the brain is really built for it. So what we try when we start training people in flow, one of the things we try to do is start your day, start your work session with 90 to 110 minutes of uninterrupted concentration if you can, right? And start by starting. So start with 10 minutes or 20 minutes, but that's what you want to work for and you want to aim for. And you want to practice distraction management, and you also want to have conversations ahead of time, right? Like, 99— modern average American worker gets interrupted once every 11 minutes. So you got to talk to your coworkers, you got to talk to your boss. If you're working from home, talk to your spouse, your kids, right? Like, you'll end up with more time for everybody else. McKinsey did a study on top executives and flow and found them 500% more productive than out of flow, right? That's a huge uptick in productivity. So you're gonna get time back in the end, but you gotta have the conversations ahead of time so people know what you, what you're doing and why you're doing it. So they will sort of respect your, you know, I, I colloquially, like, I tell people when I give speeches and I, and I like to say this in big companies that if you can't put a sign on your door that says fuck off, I'm flowing, you can't do this work. And I like to use that language because it catches people's attention when you in corporate America, but it's really true. Like, you can't— like, you're not gonna— the brain is— does— we don't multitask well. It's not designed for that. It's a serial processor. It's built for 90 to 120 minutes of uninterrupted concentration. And so you want to maximize flow, maximize, you know, productivity. You want to use the brain the way it was designed, you know, to be used, in a sense.

Is there too much flow? Can you get into too much flow state and get stuck in it for too long? Is there negative side effects?

Like, no, that—

well, Okay.

So there's all kinds of stuff. Yeah. So there's a dark side to flow. So flow is this huge high, all these pleasure neurochemicals. It's followed— there's a recovery period on the back end of flow. It's not a— flow is not a singular experience. It's a 4-stage cycle and you have to move through different stages of the cycle. Flow is the 3rd stage of the cycle. There's a recovery stage on the back end. You tend to maintain your good mood in flow, but it's very fragile because you don't have any more of these feel-good neurochemicals and they take a little while to replenish. Mesh. Um, so flow— nobody lives in a flow state. If, you know, every now and again, uh, this used to happen to me all the time. Uh, people would stop because I've been telling the story enough, but, uh, people used to come up to me and be like, dude, you gotta study me, I'm in flow all the time. And I would never know what to do because, like, finally I was— I just decided I was going to start telling the truth. We have a word for that. We call that schizophrenia. Sometimes we call that mania. You know what I mean? Like, that's not a good thing. Nobody lives in flow. And even in the spiritual community, people have this idea that enlightenment is kind of nonstop flow, and it's not. It's not like— I have a lot of people who've studied the neurobiology of what enlightenment could be. It's not satori, which is a brief awakening, right? A state that does seem to correspond to flow. So the brief state, not a stage of development. Enlightenment is a stage, or permanently somehow illuminated. And we have some ideas of what that is, but it's not flow, and it's not a constant flow state. So that's— those are— we're looking at different phenomena, different things neurobiologically, um, and probably, you know, spiritually as well. You know what I mean?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I know you got to get going, man. It's been a fantastic interview. I really appreciate your time. What's the last send-off takeaway message for the audience? A place our listeners can check out your new book?

Uh, narcountry.com is the website for the book. Um, and, uh, if you want to check that out, available wherever books are sold. Um, if you want to learn more about, uh, the flow work we do, getmoreflow.com is sort of one-stop shopping for that one. Flowresearchcollective.com, stephencottler.com, And the only parting message I have for you, you know, thoughts is I spent my entire sort of career covering these extraordinary moments, right? The impossible becomes possible. I met the people behind it. And I want to say over and over, like, I, everybody I've seen who's done these extraordinary things, none of them started out extraordinary, right? They just start out like you and me, and it's the regular application of the same sort of core principles and flow day after day, week after week, that, that's what— that's, that's the road to impossible. And I just think after 30 years of studying this stuff, we are all capable of so much more than we know, right? That I always— the thing about flow that I always point out to people is like, you gotta start— you got a weird challenge because here's this state, it's available to all of us, it's our biology, makes you 500% more productive, 700% more creative, and, you know, increases strength and stamina and cuts learning times in half. So like, that's available to each and every one of us. So what the hell are you gonna do with that? You know what I mean? Like, that's a— that's interesting. It's a, you know, it— I always say, what impossible challenge aren't you tackling? What would you challenge? What would you do if you could be 500% more productive and 700% more creative? Because you— that's what this science of peak performance allows us to do. But you know, what will you do with this information? That's sort of up to each and every one of us.

That's awesome, man. Really appreciate it. Take care. I know, I know our guys are going to love this one. So take care and I'll talk to you soon, man.

Justin, thank you for your interest in my work. I appreciate it.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. It feels good to pummel your to-do list and free up more space in your life. On the subject of punching things, meet Krista Stryker. She's an amateur boxer, journalist, entrepreneur, and world-renowned fitness fitness expert. Here's what she had to say about training with us at the Flow Research Collective. Quote: Before learning about flow, I felt like life was just kind of happening to me. I felt there was no real control over it, why sometimes I have good days and sometimes I have bad days. After completing Zero to Dangerous, my life is a lot more intentional now. Being in flow has helped me to complete my second book as a writer and prepare for my next fight as an amateur boxer, and I can't thank the Flow Research Collective enough for for it. That's epic to hear, Krista. We're super stoked that you shared that with us. And if you're listening in and you want to take back control of your time, your work, and your mind, go to getmoreflow.com. We'd love to work with you to achieve your boldest goals in less time and with more ease. Again, just go to getmoreflow.com to get started.

All the best.

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