Becoming Superhuman: Neuroscience of Peak Performance with Dr. Sahar Yousef

Right before a big presentation, you go up. Yeah. You get those like butterflies. We want that. That's your biology helping you. That's your biology saying, listen, just in case that cup of coffee and last night's sleep isn't enough, I'm giving you a boost. I'm giving you a boost. 'Cause evidently your brain is telling your body like, oh, we care about this. We don't wanna, we don't wanna fudge this up. We wanna make sure this goes well. Hormones will start going and you're gonna, it's gonna help put you in the brain state of focus, of deep focus, of flow.

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 your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Dr. Sahar Yousef, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. Really great to have you here.

So excited to be here. Nice to meet you.

Yeah, you too, you too. So I'm going to give you a quick intro here. So you are a cognitive neuroscientist as well as the youngest faculty at UC Berkeley's School of Business. You've conducted research on brain plasticity, human performance enhancement, and cognitive training, starting out in psychopharmacology and then transitioning to non-invasive training work through the Veterans Administration and building on over 10 years of research in the field of human performance. Your consulting practice helps executives, creatives, and engineers become more productive and effective at work. And outside of the academic world, you co-run Becoming Superhuman, which is a training and consulting firm that teaches busy professionals who think for a living— so knowledge workers— how to get the most important work done in less time With less stress, and you've been featured everywhere from Forbes to the Wall Street Journal to Wired and Business Insider. So really, really impressive and just exciting background. And I'm excited to dive into a few topics that are extremely relevant to our audience. And I want to start with a question based on the headline of your, your main website, which says, I help busy leaders and their teams get their most important work done in less time. And so I'm curious how you do that. And I'm sure there's 1 to 3, maybe big things that come to mind to start us off with respect to interventions that you use with busy leaders, busy teams to, to help them improve performance. So we'd love to dive into a number of those.

Oh, I love that. Okay, you've done your homework. All right. Now, I would say that I'm trying to create a sort of a summarized version because there's quite a bit that we could cover. But I want to talk about a term that we use very frequently with clients that we work with, in addition to our students, our MBA students over at UC Berkeley, and that is a goal state. It is the goal that we would have for any one individual that we work with, or any team, or any organization. So it does scale. And that's state is a state of sustainable peak performance. And it sounds like otherwise a very simple term that we can all, you know, use our logic and context to kind of guess and imagine what that means. But I do think it does a disservice. And in unpacking each of these terms, I can kind of convey what we do with leaders and their teams to make sure that they can get as much of their work done as possible. In less time with less stress. And I'm going to go, we're going to go in like backwards essentially. So we're going to start with performance and then I'm going to layer on and we're going to talk about peak performance and then we'll talk about sustainable peak performance. So first performance, the term performance truly refers to the act of running as it were. It's execution. It's about speed. It's the act of doing. This is really the heart of productivity. It is how can we most efficiently get the work done that we need to get done? So I really consider it again, the act of running. It's just speed and execution. Then you have peak performance. Peak performance is making sure that you're running, yes, as fast as humanly possible, but in the right direction. Because I can't tell you how many heartbreaking instances I've experienced where someone just brings, oh my gosh, so much exciting energy to the table. They bring so much, uh, just, just truly like passion. To the table and they're running super fast, but just in the slightly wrong direction. And the outcome is not exactly where the team would want, where the organization would want, where would they themselves want for that, even their own career. So to be peak performing is to make sure that we're keenly aware of our priorities, the right priorities, and we have alignments on what those priorities happen to be. So that's peak performance, the difference between peak performance and performance in and of itself. Then you have sustainable peak performance. Now, to be sustainably peak performing means to be able to run as fast as you possibly can in the right direction and to be able to do that quarter after quarter, year after year without burning out. Because at the end of the day, we are humans, not machines. We are biological creatures and we have biological laws and needs that we need to abide by. So we need to make sure that we're sustainably peak performing. So that's the quick sort of overarching, I would say, ethos of our lab, our research team, and the work that we do with teams and companies. Now, practically speaking, what do we install as best practices to make sure that we can hit sustainable peak performance? And I'd like to, I'm gonna continue to go with the laws of 3, right? Like great things happen in threes. There's the how of work, there's the what of work, right? And I'm going to focus on those, I think, in the beginning, and then we're going to talk about the sustainability piece. So in terms of how people go about work, I think this is something that is underemphasized across the board. If I had it my way, we'd even— we teach children from the earliest age possible how to learn in school. When we start a job, we need— instead of focusing so much on the job description, the what of work. I think we ought to be focusing just as hard on the how of work. How should we go about getting what we want done, done? What is the best practice for having a meeting? Something as simple as that. What are, what are the best practices for clear communication, for collaboration, for innovation, for work execution and task execution? We don't typically focus on the how, and that's something that our lab specializes in. It's really focusing on the how. And we have methodologies. One of them that I can talk to you about are called focus sprints. And focus sprints are really intentional short periods of time where an individual is encouraged to one, identify exactly what they'd like to accomplish in that focus sprint, really intentionally focusing on a task or a set of tasks that they'd like to be done with at the end of, let's say, for example, it's a 1-hour focus sprint, then actually blocking that time off in a calendar. Making sure that we're setting expectations with your team, especially if you share a calendar with your team, that there's a shared language. And folks can see that you're clearly doing a focus sprint. This will allow me as the individual doing the focus sprint to feel comfortable, not feeling that I need to be immediately responsive on Slack or email, that everyone knows that I'm sitting down, I'm doing heads-down work, I'm intensely focusing, I'm doing the heaviest lift item for the team, for the company right now. I'm not taking a siesta and just being MIA and unresponsive for the sake of it. Like, please trust. And that lets me be comfortable. So I know that everyone knows that I'm doing a focus sprint and they themselves are likely doing focus sprints on their own calendars at some point in time. So there's a shared understanding there. So you've clearly marked it in your calendar. Now my hormones, there's anticipatory hormones that happen when I know a time is coming for focus. Very similar to when you know that a presentation is coming up. Let's say, for example, people get the butterflies, they get some cortisol and adrenaline going, like right before a big presentation, before you get up on stage, or nowadays we can call it the Zoom stage. It seems just as common, but right before a big presentation, you go up, yeah, you get those like butterflies. Those are— we want that. That's your biology helping you. That's your biology saying, listen, just in case that cup of coffee and last night's sleep isn't enough, I'm giving you a boost. I'm giving you a boost because evidently your brain is telling your body like, oh, we care about this. We don't want to, we don't want to fudge this up. We want to make sure this goes well. If you know a focus sprint is coming, similar things will happen. Hormones will start going and you're going to, it's going to help put you in the brain state of focus, of deep focus, of flow, of getting into a state of flow. So if you can, if you know a focus sprint is coming a few hours in advance, it's just helping your brain get into that right headspace. So we set the time up in the calendar in advance. Then we make sure that we do what we call, by the way, digital hygiene in our lab. That's a huge thing that we focus on when we work with teams. Digital hygiene means your relationship with your notifications and your devices. That means phone is out of sight, out of mind. It's the number one drainer of cognitive performance and cognitive capacity in the 21st century, by a large margin. Our relationship with our phones and the notifications specifically coming out of all of our devices. It's draining human capital. Let me just put it that way. It's not possible for us to focus, to actually get into deep work when we're getting interrupted every minute or two, couple minutes. So we want to make sure that we have quote unquote good digital hygiene by making sure that notifications are turned off, phone is out of sight, out of mind. We're not logged into email. I, I, I, it totally tickles me in all of the worst ways when I walk around an office, an open office, and I can see, you know, how people are working. I see this amazingly intelligent, highly educated, let's say for example, engineer sitting down, terminals open, you know, she or he is coding. And then I see their inbox in Slack open on the other screen the entire time. And they keep darting their eyes over looking at it, like literally every 40 seconds. They're like trying to code and solve a problem. And they're like, they're like the dog from the movie Up, if you're familiar. It's like every 40 seconds, like squirrel. Squirrel. And if they're in an open office, right? Oh my gosh, God forbid. Then people are walking by also. And you're just like overhearing conversations. So they're just completely darting every, every which direction, every couple of seconds. And it's just impossible to get work done effectively and efficiently in that kind of environment, digital environment and environmental environment. So we really push digital hygiene. You've got all, you've eliminated as many distractions as you possibly can. If you need to, you get your noise-canceling headphones in. You've got some visual barriers set up so that you make sure that you're not distracted by people walking by. You make sure folks know that you're doing a focus sprint. If need be, get a do not disturb sign. We make those for teams that we work with. We have do not disturb lights. If folks have, they can put those near where they're working or actually attach it to these, these dividers that we also make for teams. So people can get like a focus sprint hygiene setup going. It's like, this is not the time for you to ad hoc come by and ask me a question or like come tap on my shoulder. Because I'm doing a focus sprint, et cetera. So you've set yourself up environmentally, you go in and you know exactly what you're going to work on, on a piece of paper. You make sure that you break down those tasks in a tiny little manageable subtask. You timebox everything. Say first 10 minutes, I'm going to knock this out. Then the following 15 minutes, I'm going to work on slides 1 through 4, and I'm going to complete those slides for this deck. Then I'm going to spend 5 minutes answering this email. And then I'm going to round it out by spending 5 minutes doing this other thing. And then you time, time, like, like literally, I mean, like buy a timer, have it be visible in front of you and start timing yourself and start knocking out that work, no distractions. And at the very end, you take a break, just a couple minutes where you're not processing information. And a break doesn't include things like I'm going to catch up on, on email or Slack, or, or even if it's personal to you, I've actually, I had this amazing executive once say, it's like, oh, I have a, I have a book, a fiction book that I bring into the office and I read for fun for my breaks. I'm like, you're still processing information. That's not giving your brain a break. So you actually need to cease processing information, walk away, go look out the window, you know, make yourself an elaborate snack, make a cup of tea if you like, but, but do something. But focus sprints are probably the bread and butter of what we install at companies with teams to make them as effective and, you know, in many ways superhuman. As we call it. And that's really focusing on the how of work. And the what of work is really those tasks that you choose. It's that the peak part of the peak performance that we talk about. And then in the very end, to round this out, we talk about burnout prevention techniques, stress management, energy management, making sure that you know exactly your, for example, I'll give you an example, your biological chronotype. A chronotype is a genetic factor that every person is born with. And it's your, essentially your preset circadian rhythm, which humans do not have the same one, which we thought, by the way, this was the 2017 Nobel Prize in medicine, by the way. So a couple of years before the pandemic hit, we found out as a scientific community that humans do not have one preset circadian rhythm. In general, yes, humans are awake during the day and asleep at night, but we do have a few different circadian rhythms and it's a genetic component. So you can't change it. It doesn't evolve. You know, it doesn't change in your lifetime. And this is science behind colloquially what we've all kind of said, like, oh, someone's a morning person, someone's a night owl. There's now actual science to back that up. So we have 3 core types: AM shifted, which means essentially morning birds, people that wake up with the sun and go down with the sun. Then you have PM shifted folks on the opposite end of the spectrum. This is, this is, uh, I am a PM shift person. We're the minority genetically in the human population. And then you've got the majority of the human population. These are folks that are called biphasic. Biphasic stands for two, bi, phase, meaning peak. So two peaks. These are folks that have a pretty amazing spike in energy levels and cognitive capacity about mid-morning until about after lunch. And then they have a pretty severe afternoon dip and then they have a second wind later in the day. And then you have shifting rhythms in between, but those are the the 3 core types. So we make sure we chronotype everybody that we work with. Everyone knows when to do their focus sprints, when they're at their peak performance hours, because they can get so much more done during their peak than they would other times a day. And that's sort of a quick version of what we install with teams and companies.

Amazing, Sarah. That was a fantastic breakdown. I appreciate that. You wrote an article, or at least were cited in an article for the Chicago Tribune titled "Three Misconceptions About Remote Work and How to Manage Them" in February of last year. And those three misconceptions were productivity does not equal hours worked, access does not equal connection, and less commute time does not equal more sleep. And I'd love if you could break each of those down for us and give a little bit more context on each of those pillars and anything else that feels worth mentioning around remote work as well. Huge amount of people listening to this are working remotely.

Amazing. Sure. So to tee up the first one for me one more time, if you can.

The first one was productivity does not equal hours worked.

I think the folks that I know that listen to, listen to you know this in their bones. I think that productivity is no longer outside of the factory working and industrial context. It's not about widgets. We're not making widgets. It's not about numbers in, numbers out, as in if I put 5 more hours into a factory, then I'm going to get— it will linearly increase with the amount of work product and work outcome. Welcome to knowledge work, guys. Knowledge work is not like that. You will have an aha moment in the shower on a Saturday night, and that could set the entire direction and strategy for your company and for your team. You did not plan that, and that aha moment could have been after months of not coming up with any good ideas, banging your head against a wall trying to solve a problem, and then all of a sudden, lo and behold, at being on vacation on a Saturday, let's say, you're gonna have this aha moment just naked in the shower. The point I'm making here is that there is no longer a linear relationship between number of hours put in and the outcomes that we're getting out of those hours. So we have what we call a nonlinear relationship with productivity now as knowledge workers. Having said that, I think it's of utmost importance for companies and teams to now understand this and acknowledge it upfront that we don't want to promote what we call presenteeism. Presenteeism being showing up for the sake of showing up. You invite me to a 3-hour meeting and I just say, okie dokie. And I accept the invite even though I totally don't need to be there. If I actually looked carefully at the agenda that you hopefully sent out in advance, if I look at the agenda, I'm not really taking lead on any one of these. I'm not an active participant in this meeting. Let's say, for example, but I'm going to show up anyway. So I just took 3 hours of my precious time and I dumped it into a meeting that I didn't need to be in. For example, right? We want to make sure that the people that are working with us on our teams, the people that are working in our companies, we ourselves are respecting our brains, respecting our own work enough so that we feel the confidence, the autonomy to be able to say, that is not a good use of my time and I'm going to opt out of that. You know what is a good use of my time? Blocking off an hour and getting this important piece of work done. And I'm going to do that during my peak biological time, my peak performance window based on my chronotype, because I know that I will get my work done 5 times faster during, for example, let's say 9 to 11:00 AM than if I were to wait and punt this to the afternoon because come 2, 3 o'clock, I am just feeling brain dead every single day. And I let my entire morning be littered with meetings, for example. So I think the big ask here, um, I have this saying that I've been sort of pushing recently, and that is that we are better than life's default settings. We're better than our digital devices' default settings. Like just in general, I am better than the default settings. And I just really want people to acknowledge that, embrace that as a lifestyle, especially as it relates to how we work together, because the default settings are not there to help us, that they're just the default. You need to go in and customize it because we're better than that. So if you have, let's say for example, a very distracting environment that you're working in, do something about it. Don't just say like, oh, I'm distracted all the time. Do something about it. If you leave your inbox open and all of these notifications like constantly streaming in and it's distracting and it's hard for you to do your productive work during the work hours, you end up saving it evenings and weekends and now you're burning out. Do something about it. Update it. Update. The default settings that life is giving you. So that's just my piece on the nonlinear relationship with productivity and how it's so important for us to push back, to design and architect systems and environments that actually allow us to bring our best selves to our jobs and our work in a way that is again sustainably peak performing. And don't just let other people dictate to you how that's going to go. It may require a little bit of augmentation on, on your part, And that leads us beautifully into the second piece that you mentioned, and that is around—

Access does not equal connection was the, yeah, was the second one.

Yeah. Yeah. It's important for us to, yes, communicate and be accessible to our teams, especially if you are a people leader, if you're a manager, or if you are a domain expert and people will come to you with questions. You don't want to be the blocker on the team where someone is waiting for you to be unblocked, for example. However, there is a world of difference between being accessible and being constantly connected and being constantly connected, especially within the context of remote or hybrid work, is one of the biggest mistakes that we can possibly make. There's biological reasons why humans are compelled to make those mistakes though, in the first place. And that is that humans are very, very social creatures. We're actually the most social species on the face of the planet. We are so deeply tied to one another. We care so deeply about one another and what everybody thinks and being accessible and being available and not seeming like we're MIA or letting somebody down that we will overcorrect and we will be accessible and available all day, every day. Someone sent you an email at 7 and you're just like, okay, sounds good. We'll get to that. You just want to let them know that you're, that you're here, that you've received the message. And this is one of the biggest mistakes that I see companies making from all around the world. Especially this is exacerbated by the way, when we go remote, because now people can't see you. That sort of presenteeism that we were talking about before, it doesn't even exist because before at least people would see you in the office. So they're just like, oh, well, I see Sahar was there today. Sure. I mean, I didn't hear from her, but I know she was there. And so that means she's getting work done. Some work is getting done. Surely she'll get to my email another time. But now that we can't see each other, we have this background fear that if people can't see me, how are they going to know that I'm working? And on the flip, if I can't see my people as a leader, how will I know that they're working? So we have what ends up happening, and this is definitely backed up by the research that we're seeing in the past few years, you see hyper-responsiveness, hyper-responsiveness, especially in hybrid and remote teams. This is in this, this perpetual presenteeism is exacerbated. This constant need to show that I'm online, I'm available, I'm working from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. I want to seem like I'm quote unquote busy and available. What I push back on is, first of all, that fundamentally, I push back on all of that, but there's a way to do it where you're still accessible in case of emergency, in case of a fire. I'm not suggesting we go dark and then you just say like, oh, I, there's all these walls up and you'll never get ahold of me. No, of course not. Of course not. However, the key here is to develop what we call a communication escalation path. Communication escalation path is— could be literally as simple as saying, hey, guess what? Email me if you need something in the next day or so, if it's not urgent. If you need something in the next 2 to 3 hours, please send me a message, a chat message of some sort, because I'm going to check that more often. If it's an absolute fire, like drop everything you're doing emergency, please pick up the phone and call me. Simple as that. You've got 3 layers there. That's a communication escalation path that lets me, as the sender— let's say I need to contact you and I need to send something by end of day to a client, and I need some info from you in order to make that happen— then I would likely choose, maybe if it's also a heavy task, so like there's a bunch of attachments and everything, I'll send an email to you But I'll probably send you a Slack message or a chat message of some sort. And I'll say, oh, just letting you know, I sent you an email, just need a response by, you know, in the next 4 hours, because I need to send it by end of day. That allows you to triage. What that allows you to do on the receiving end is you do not have your email open 24/7 anymore, because you don't need to, you know, that if it's a fire, someone's going to pick up the phone and call you. You also know that if in between your meetings and your focus sprints, you check your messages, your chat messages, that someone will alert you when they need a response in the next 2 to 3 hours. Now you have, as simple as it is, but it's a, it's a, it's, it's a non-elegant solution to an otherwise really, really demanding and problem that is very pervasive across organizations. People feel like, oh, I can't do the focus sprint you talked about because I can't go dark and heads down for an hour. An emergency might happen. First of all, what? An emergency? You need to keep your inbox open 24/7 in case of a fire? Why is it? Why is somebody sending, sending you a digital letter when there's an emergency? Like, pick up the phone. If the house is on fire, don't like send me an email about it. Like, call me. Like there's got to be an escalation, like a way that we're communicating in a way that makes sense and is efficient. I don't know if you have thoughts on that or if you've experienced things like that in the past yourself.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I love the idea of the escalation strategy. Makes total sense. A really nice, simple way to put it as well. And it is strange that people don't stagger communication mediums as much as you would assume. Assumed that all are equal and that there's not as much of a necessity to identify the level of urgency and the degree to which the thing should or should not be escalated. So absolutely love that breakdown. The final one from this Tribune article was on sleep. And I was curious about it. It was kind of an interesting point that the time saved commuting when working at home is not necessarily going towards sleep and maybe is not necessarily going towards other positive things. So I'd love your thoughts, Sahar, on what you're seeing with the clients you work with around what the commute time that is being saved is getting reallocated toward generally and how people can make sure that it gets reallocated effectively.

I'm so glad we're chatting about this because we're seeing this continuing to be an issue. Even now, this is now years into the pandemic, but I will tell you the data early on in the pandemic, and this came out of Microsoft actually earlier than it did most other research teams and research groups. This is data on tens of thousands of people around the world, knowledge workers and teams around the world, different companies, different industries. That time, the commute time, 100% went towards chat. We saw over 200% a huge spike on chat usage in off hours that were otherwise used for commuting. That was early in the morning. We're talking 8 to 9 AM typically across time zones in your local time zone. Later in the evening, we see it. We saw huge email and chat usage increases in the, in the late evenings. And you see two spikes actually. You see a spike in the later hours. Typically for folks that are single and maybe earlier in their careers. And then you see another huge spike typically after kids have gone off to bed. And those are going to be from parents that are getting back online. This is after 8, sometimes 9 PM, 9, 8, 8, 9 PM until about 11 PM. You see this huge spike in, again, Teams usage, chat usage, in addition to email. Huge spike on the weekends as well. We have continued to see this as a trend. This is not just data that Microsoft is collecting. This is data from Stanford. This is data from our lab at Berkeley. This is data from Wharton. We're seeing this across the board and across industries that people— this was, again, we cannot say with certainty that this will continue to be an issue, but I can tell you my hope was— I was on multiple talk shows and podcasts. We were talking about this research a year and a half, 2 years ago. And I was one of those voices saying, guys, everybody, hold on. Let's take a breath here. It's a pandemic. There's— people are stuck inside. There's nothing for them to do. I get that they're not making healthy choices. I can see, and it's much to my chagrin, that people aren't sleeping or maybe exercising at home or just meditating or doing things that bring them joy and comfort during those off hours. But it's a weird time right now. Give it a— give it, give, give folks a little bit of time to just sink into this. And we might see the data kind of shift. No, unfortunately I was wrong. We did not see the data shift. People are still using the time in the early mornings and late evenings and on weekends to catch up on work. And I think the culprit is honestly that there's no workday. I, I pushed the finger back and I'm not blaming the people themselves. They're catching up on work because they need to get their work done. I'm blaming meetings. I'm blaming our organizational culture on how email, like digital communication and meetings are getting handled. We've seen a huge spike in the number of meetings that people are having, and two-thirds, by the way, this is COVID data, two-thirds of meetings are anonymously rated as being not a good use of their time, like, as at the individual level. So I think we could do a much better job making sure people actually have the time and the space to get their work done during work hours. And then we may not see people jumping back online at 8 PM after their kids have gone to bed, finally catching up. On work.

It's a great, it's a great point. I love that breakdown as well. So I want to ask you, uh, just a slight pivot here for a second, um, but what some of the primary learnings you had personally were during your, your PhD. You did a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Berkeley, and that's no small feat. Um, anyone who's done a PhD knows that. I haven't done one, but, but I've heard. So I'm curious what some of the biggest insights were for you individually when completing that. And also, if you could, maybe to lead in, just give a little bit more context for folks listening on what it was that you were, you were researching and that, that you focused your PhD on.

Happy to. Yes. So I specialized in a concept and a phenomenon known as cognitive neuroplasticity. Now, neuroplasticity is this phenomenon that the brain changes and adapts according to environmental conditions and training. So our brain is not static. It's dynamic. It changes. It adapts just like the muscles, right? You go to the gym and you could pump some iron and you can get a bigger— potentially, if I only worked out, let's say for example, my right bicep, like that would grow bigger and stronger. And then my left one would not. You can actually go in and train almost like precision medicine. You can train accordingly. And the brain also adapts, trains, and it's plastic. Neuroplasticity. Now cognitive neuroplasticity. Is really zooming in on cognitive performance as it relates to neuroplasticity. So we're talking about attention, we're talking about memory, we're talking about information processing speed, we're talking about general fluid intelligence. And the big focus for my research was and continues to be cognitive training. So what can we do non-invasively, because I used to do more pharma research, but what can we do without drugs And without other invasive methodologies, what can we train people to do internally and naturally? Maybe strategies, maybe techniques, maybe going of mindset changes to actually improve, measurably improve cognitive performance, but also literally change the brain and how the brain is structured. What can we do in a short amount of time with people that are already super smart and already super healthy? So not necessarily focusing in on traumatically brain injured populations or populations that are clinical. That was my area of focus. Now, I'll tell you about one thing that is, I think, the most important thing that I learned and gained, like an insight gained from this research and this work, and that is that it's possible. Because I can tell you when I was first starting out, it didn't seem possible. I actually had a faculty member from Stanford kind of not laugh in my face, but definitely chuckle pretty, pretty hard during a meeting when I was presenting some of my hypotheses. I'm like, all right, this is going to be the— this is the layout. This is what I want to do for the next couple of years. He was just like, you can't take these Cal undergrads. You can't take Stanford students that are like— it's like they're 21 years old. They're at the peak of their cognitive. They're like the cream of the crop. Their brains are perfect. They're some of the smartest people in the entire world. And they're young and super healthy. You can't take that brain and then just arbitrarily, like a sci-fi movie, like decide to just like, oh yeah, we're going to make them even smarter. Like, it's like, no, it's not going to happen. Not true. Apparently it can happen. And we did it in 7 weeks, still non-invasively, no drugs involved. We did it in 7 weeks. So that was the big success story. That was the huge insight is that it's possible to improve cognitive performance in as little as 7 weeks with a healthy, happy human brain. That's already at its peak. And you can do it noninvasively. You can do it without a bunch of fancy stuff. You can do it literally with things, basic things like meditation, forcing yourself to sit down and focus when it's otherwise not required, forcing you to sit down and focus for long durations of time in order to train your ability to focus in the future. And you will see serious cognitive improvements. By doing something as simple as that. It's free to do, right? You don't need a class. I promise you don't need an app for it either. You can just sit down and do it. That's the beauty of it. So that's where we really focused on as much as possible. And I would say that the second thing I learned was something personal, and that is that it can be lonely to work by yourself, which is not a surprise. I don't think I'm not saying anything crazy, but the starting point for focus sprints began for me scratching my own itch. The research behind what we teach now was me solving my own lack of motivation and productivity, working in a silo, working by myself at odd hours, all alone in a lab, trying to get myself motivated enough to do really hard stuff. And I needed to create systems for myself to do it. And it turned out when I started talking openly about it, I wasn't alone. Pretty much every other PhD student that I came across was like, oh my gosh, yeah, me too. So we, we kind of band together, and, and that— those were the beginning baby stages of focus sprints, essentially. We'd all get together, we'd put our phones in a basket or change phones, so I can't check my phone during— we'd make sure that either you turn the Wi-Fi completely off, or alternatively, you make sure that, you know, everyone's in full screen mode, that you're no email open. We just make sure everyone's hygiene was on point. What exactly are you going to get done in the next 30 minutes? Let's check in in 30 minutes and make sure you've got it done. You have accountability now. It's a team sport. And that was a huge game changer and something that, you know, kind of created the passion that I have for optimizing how people get work done. Because listen, at the end of the day, I'm not going to cure cancer. That's not what I studied. I'm not going to get, you know, rockets to Mars. It's also not what I studied. I can't change the world, but if I can help people, other people, smarter people that are dedicating their lives to these things, if I can help them do it more efficiently and more effectively, if I can help other people get better ideas, execute faster, then hopefully I can do my small part in moving humanity forward. And that was sort of the big unlock for me is like, oh, I can help people be more productive in a sustainable way where they're happier and healthier. Oh, wait a minute. I can help Smart people solve big problems in the world. That's cool. I can focus on that. I can't solve the big problems on my own, but I can help the people part. I love it.

I love it. Yeah, no, that's great. What has it been like for you personally transitioning more into the business world from academia? I'd love for you to speak a little bit to your personal experience on what it's like to see the inside of both startups and tech and the fast pace that exists within that world, and then also within academia, obviously being at Berkeley and having been there for so long. What are some of the differences and pros and cons that you've experienced to both of those worlds?

I will say very different worlds, which it won't come as a surprise to you or anyone else. The pace is markedly different, but I like the pace, and I would say I prefer the pace to, uh, in industry more than I do in academia. I thrive in that kind of fast pace. Well, maybe it's no surprise there. I, at the end of the day, I'm a productivity researcher, so of course I like productivity. I like it when things are moving forward, things are progressing, things are timely. I appreciate it myself, and I like seeing it happen in other organizations. Organizations. I will say some of the bigger differences though. When it comes to innovation, I can focus on that because I see this is an area where I do believe actually that industry can learn from academia. One of the only ways I think industry can learn from academia. Otherwise, I think we should tip our hats to industry. With the fervor with which industry moves, etc. But when it comes to innovation, because that is truly what an academic's bread and butter is, at the end of the day, what scientists are supposed to be doing is coming up with very big novel ideas, testing those hypotheses and those ideas, and then coming out with the research and then coming up with more ideas. That's, that is, that is what our jobs are. So innovation at scale. Reliable innovation is really what we're supposed to be experts in, regardless of the field we're in. And I know so many leaders, I've sat down with so many CEOs over the years that are just so, so petrified of losing innovation, of losing market share, of dipping in their economic positions for their, for their companies in their industries, because they're afraid a smaller, more nimble startup is going to come and take over. They're going to, they're going to hashtag innovate and disrupt them out of their marketplace. And I think, yes, that's a valid concern. But I think that the way that we in industry go about trying to create the conditions necessary for innovation is typically not correct. And there's a couple of key, key pieces missing. One, time and space, which we've sort of been talking about, right? You can't take smart, highly educated minds that you hired and you're not paying an arm and a leg for, by the way. Like, you're just like, oh my gosh, great. Let's hire an additional 25, you know, headcount so that hopefully we will increase innovation. Okay, great. What are you, what are you doing with those people? They're just in meetings all day. You literally, you hooked them up to the inbox and they're now just fielding messages all day, every day, Monday through Friday. And you're like, huh, How come there's been no amazing ideas yet? What? How are these people supposed to be thinking clearly? They're just communicating all day. So I think giving time and space, and that's something that academia, I think, does very, very well. The default is you're sitting pretty much by yourself, which I think academia does the other extreme. We're very lonely. We're sort of in our little caves, like, thinking by ourselves all day. And I'm like, you know, I'm like, start talking to my whiteboard markers, like, in my office. Like, it's a little extreme. I'm not saying to go into that extreme. However, You need to give people time and space. We are open in academia to sabbaticals. It's like, you want to take 2, 3 months off, go off the grid, come back with 5 amazing ideas. Give people time and space to be creative where they're not inundated with constant communication and production. So there's that. And the second is psychological safety, which has been shown across the board, across so many different studies to be the number one factor for not only high-performing teams and productive teams, but also innovative teams. You want people to come up with amazing ideas that are going to push your company forward. You need to let them come up with crazy and stupid ideas too. That is a part of it. 90% of the ideas are going to be absolute horse doo-doo, and you need to be okay with that as a leader. You need to be like, great, amazing, I love it. Yes, more of this. Keep coming. Keep bringing those ideas. And yes, we may what we call shoot the puppy. We may say like, great, you came up with this idea, like that's not going to work for X, Y, and Z reason, but this is awesome, keep it coming, keep it coming, keep it coming. In academia, we're not afraid to be wrong. That's a part of our job. We fail, by the way, on a daily basis. That is literally our job. If we were too afraid to try stuff and to come up with crazy ideas and crazy theories, we would not be innovating at all in the scientific world. We would not come up with new drugs. We would not come up with cures to diseases. You need to be able to think out of the box and you need to be okay with being wrong and failing over and over again. So what I'm really saying is that at an organizational level, leaders need to incentivize failure. It's not just be okay with it. Like literally say, like, you come up with a crazy idea, go after it, get after it. How can I best support you to get after this? Give it a month. Let's see how far you get and we'll reevaluate. If you want innovation to happen at scale, that's how you need to go do it. It's psychological safety. Folks want to go and read more about that, I highly encourage it.

Super, Sarah. Yeah, another phenomenal breakdown there. Final question for you, which is a question about a question that we like to ask all of our more academic research-oriented guests. So if you could click your fingers and immediately have all of the research done, the randomized control trials, whatever it is, to answer any question that you've been pondering, what would that question be?

So much power and so much possibility. I would be curious to dive— this is something our lab is currently noodling on a lot, and that's the science behind burnout. It's a big topic right now, I would say, around the world. I would want to know, and I would want to research more ways that we can employ what we call complete psychological detachment from life's responsibilities, which has been shown to be the primary way that we can prevent burnout from happening in the first place. But if I could snap my fingers and have a wide variety of different randomized controls, which by the way is really hard to do in the pursuit of burnout research, because when somebody's burned out, it's not clinical. And you kind of want to help them. So can you imagine sitting down with, let's say for example, a CEO of a burned-out company, and you're like, okay, you've got 10,000 people working for you, I'm only going to help 5,000 of them, we're going to let the other 5,000 keep being burned out and just flailing? No, people are like, absolutely not. If you've got a solution, I want everyone to have access to it. It seems unethical. So it's very difficult for us to go about embarking on research on the topic of burnout in a very, I would say, scientifically valid way. Having said that, if I could snap my fingers and just have the answer, I would love to be able to give the clients that we work with more answers, more options in the pursuit of preventing burnout and also healing from it if it's already been established. So that would be my big, my big hope. And we're going to get there. I think it's just, it's going to take a couple of years for us to unearth more nuggets of wisdom and knowledge here, um, out of our labs.

That's a great one. Love that. Alrighty, well, thank you so much, Sarah. I appreciate it. I'm going to encourage everyone to check out more about your work in the links that we'll have below the episode, um, on YouTube and in our podcast players, so everyone can dive deeper with you there. And again, thank you so much for your time. This was just value-packed for people, tons of applicable elements. So really appreciate the time.

I so appreciate the conversation, and I loved your last question too. Now you got me super excited. I'm like gonna— I'm juiced. I'm ready to go focus sprint on burnout now, burnout research. So I love it. Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks so much. All the best. If what you've heard on Flow Research Collective Radio has been helpful, please consider doing us a solid and leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you are listening to this. Reviews help us connect to a wider audience so we can get these peak performance principles out to more people.