Breaking Through Blocks To Unleash Creative Flow

I know as a writer, there are days where something happens. It's like this magical force takes over my body, out my fingers, onto my keyboard, that then turn into the copy that I write. And that's kind of what I define as flow state.

Your brain is a giant pattern recognition system. As a writer, you have to know your starts and your endings. Where am I beginning? Where am I going? And your brain will do that for you. This is how intuition works. This is how mapmaking in the brain works. The hippocampus is essentially designed to do just this. People get stuck because they don't know where they're going. They don't know the your ending. This is really dangerous when writing a novel. You'll hear a lot of writers, big name, big name novelists, what they're really trying to figure out is what is my damn ending? Where am I starting? Where am I going? And everything else will sort of take care of itself. Also, the experience is autotelic, which is a fancy way of saying it's so damn fun and euphoric. Once writing starts becoming autotelic, it's an addiction. You have to do it every day. 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 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, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steve I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

Hello everyone and welcome to my channel. I am so freaking excited about the special guest that I'm going to be interviewing today. So what you may not know is, uh, last month we did a book in my Reignmaker program, which is my exclusive mentorship program for copywriters. And the book that we read was all about hacking altered states of consciousness, "Stealing Fire" by the incredible Stephen Kotler and Jamie Wheal. And I thought, oh my gosh, how cool would it be to be able to actually bring in the author of this book to interview on all things flow, altered states of consciousness, consciousness hacking. The conversation is about to get super juicy. So I have to say, our, our speaker is amazing. He is a New York Times bestselling author. He's actually written, you know, 14 books. Many of those are New York Times bestselling authors. He's an award-winning journalist, actually got his start back in advertising, which was interesting to find out. Uh, and he is the executive director of Flow Research Collective. He also happens to be one of the world's leading experts on human performance. So as I mentioned, he's the author of Stealing Fire, The Art of Impossible, The Future is Faster Than You Think, The Rise of Superman, and so many more. He's also been nominated twice for a Pulitzer Prize, and his books have been translated into over 50 languages. Please give a warm welcome to Stephen Kotler. Stephen, what's up? I'm so happy you're here. Welcome to my channel.

Oh my God, you have so much enthusiasm. This is amazing.

I hear that all the time. Everyone's like, wow, do you always have that much energy? And the answer is pretty much yeah. Yeah, it's—

when I'm around people who can do I think to myself only one thought, this is why you don't have a YouTube channel, Stephen. You can't, I'm incapable of this.

Listen, there are plenty of people who have YouTube channels that are super chill. That is definitely not me, but I'm excited that you're here. So I have, oh gosh, I have so many questions for you. As you know, the Posse is a community of copywriters, content writers, storytellers, many who are just getting started on their journey, many who have been doing it for a while. And something that we as writers are obviously obsessed with, and I'm sure you have a lot to say on this matter, is flow state. And so my first question to you is, we've all heard of the word flow and we talk about being in the zone, but what is flow state? How would you define it and how would you say it's experienced?

Let's start with the definition. Scientific definition of flow is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best. That doesn't get anybody very far, but that's the technical scientific definition. It refers to— flow refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. You get so focused on what you're doing, so focused on the task at hand. For writers, so focused on the writing, everything else just starts to disappear. Action and awareness are going to start to merge. Sense of self, self-consciousness, bodily awareness is going to fade away, sometimes completely. Time is going to Pasts strangely. Occasionally it'll slow down. You'll get that freeze frame effect, right? Anybody who's been in a car crash. More frequently for writers, it speeds up. You get so sucked into what you're doing, 4 hours go by, right? And you didn't even notice. And throughout all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, and mental includes creativity, learning, motivation, productivity, and 40 other skills. That's an exaggeration, 12 other skills. go through the roof. So that's the sort of technical breakdown of flow. When scientists want to define flow, psychologists define it by 6 core characteristics and say, when you're in this state, how do you know you're in the state? There's complete concentration on the task at hand. There's this merger of action awareness. Self vanishes. Time passes strangely. And the 2 other things that we define it by is we don't experience big performance on the inside, we feel a sense of control. Holy crap, my sentences are doing things they don't normally do at like 6:00 AM on a Tuesday, right? And we also— the experience is autotelic, which is a fancy way of saying it's so damn fun and euphoric and addictive, you can't wait to get more of it. So, right, once writing starts becoming autotelic, it's an addiction. You have to do it every day. And that's sort of got to be the point. Otherwise, there's no way to have a career, I think, as a writer. So that's the psychological definition. One level deeper, and then I'm going to shut up, is the neurobiological definition, which is the work I do at the Flow Research Collective, what goes on in the brain and the body when people are performing at their absolute best and when they're in flow. I'm not— I'm happy to go as down that rabbit hole as you want me to go, but I'll stop right there.

I, I mean, I love all of that. Yeah, I mean, I hear a lot, and I'm curious what your thoughts are on this. I hear a lot of people say, Alex, I have ADHD, or my brain just can't focus. Do you believe that everybody can train themselves to reach that level of flow state, or are some people just not hardwired for it?

So, um, there's like 5 answers to your question, but I'm going to start with the first one, which is Ned Hallowell, who is the man who coined the term ADHD and a psychologist at Harvard, was on my board for a long time. He believes that what we call ADHD or ADD are actually evolutionary adaptations that produce hyperfocus and thus more flow. There's a downside, but he thinks there are adaptations, like every adaptation has a downside and a good side and a bad side, but he thinks in the modern world, this is actually, if we know how to work with it, this is a beneficial thing. 'Cause in all cases of ADD or ADHD, if you like what you're working on, Focus is not a problem. You can focus on what you're interested in. So what you may call ADHD and want to say is a focusing problem is actually a motivation and attention issue much more. So just slightly different things. So I want to start there, but I want to back up and say flow is ubiquitous. Anybody anywhere can get into flow provided certain initial conditions are met. Um, I probably I have a touch, if not a lot, of both of those conditions myself. And, you know, certainly not a problem if my— the original group of people I studied, the first study group, which was action adventure sport athletes, all of them almost at the elite levels are ADD and ADHD and are self-medicating with flow and action sports, and they can focus on, right? So like, that's an abs— that's an excuse. For sure. And knowing how to work with ADD and ADHD can actually really help you with flow sometimes. I'm not saying there aren't downsides, right? I, to the life of me, cannot sit through a lecture, right? Like, maybe I can sit through one, but like, going in, like, could I go to TED? No, I'd be like in the hallway smoking cigarettes by, you know, 10 minutes in, because it's not— I don't know how to do it. Right.

That's so interesting. Yeah. And I agree. I think almost every successful entrepreneur that I've ever met can identify with that. Yeah, I have ADHD or I have a hard time focusing. And I love that you talk about the difference between intrinsic motivation and when you're truly interested in what it is that you're doing, focus really doesn't become a problem. And I think that that acronym has really become a story for a lot of people when it comes to focus and what it is they're working on. I know as a writer, there are days where something happens, it's like this magical force takes over my body and it's beautiful. It just comes through me, out my fingers, onto my keyboard, and I'm having, you know, almost being able to write while simultaneously coming up with this incredible framework or ideas that that then turn into the copy that I write. And that's kind of what I define as flow state. But it's almost impossible to grasp on command. And so as a writer who has written, you know, 14 books, how do you overcome writer's block when you're sitting down and you go, okay, I need to get into flow so that I can keep moving forward? Through my book or whatever it is that you're writing. How do you do that?

So you're asking 4 different questions sort of disguised as one. So I have to sort of break them apart. I'm good at that. Because there's 2 different things you're asking. One is about writer's block, which we can have a separate discussion about. Second, the first thing I want to focus on is flow states have triggers, preconditions that need to lead to more flow. Short version is flow follows focus, only shows up when all our attention is in the right here, right now focused on what we're doing. So that's what all the triggers do. They drive attention into the present moment. So a lot of those triggers can be present in writing, are present in writing. The most important being pattern recognition. When we link ideas together, when we have rhythm in our words, any of those things, alliteration is a cheap way of getting at it, sort of in a sense, that releases the neurochemical dopamine. Which does a bunch of things in the body, but it massively increases focus and excitement and attention and acts as a flow trigger. So that's one of the things writers are gonna leverage all the time. What does that mean? What does that look like in practice? Simple thing is I always start my writing day one at the exact same time. And we can come back to why, but I read and edit what I wrote the day before. And I always do this. Why? Because when I'm reading and I'm editing, I'm not facing a blank page, I'm facing a pattern recognition problem. Editing is about pattern recognition, getting the rhythm of the sentences right, getting the information load right, getting all that right, all that stuff. I'm— so I'm producing little squirts of dopamine as I'm editing what I wrote the day before. So by the time I get to the blank page, Oh shit, I gotta, I gotta add 1,000 words to my manuscript today. What do I do? I'm already, if not in flow, primed for flow. So, um, one, that's really important. And two, um, I don't think— so one of the things that I can tell you separates real writers from everybody else is the amount of time you're rewriting your material. I— there is nothing of mine, I don't care if it's a sales letter that goes into public that hasn't been hammered on 40 or 50 times, read by me, read by other people, like nothing, right? And so I don't often think, you know, I worked as a magazine journalist for a really long time. This is one of the things I started to notice is the lazy magazine journalists would wanna not wanna edit their stuff. They'd wanna write it, maybe they'd tune it once, and then they'd wait for their editor to give them feedback, and then they sort of fix that and they were done. And I, one, that's stupid because your job as a writer is actually to make your editor's life easier. You work for them. You don't want to turn in copy that is actually a mess for them to have to fix. You want to turn in absolutely pristine copy that they can go, oh my God, this is great. I want to work with this person a ton. I don't have to do anything, right? And you make their boss happy. That's got to be the goal if you want to actually make a living here. You can't lean on your editor in that way, which means you have to learn how to edit yourself. You know, really, really, really well along the way. And so this training builds up that muscle, which is sort of like a grit writer's muscle, and it helps you get into flow. I also, just gonna say this, 'cause it's obvious to me, but it's not as obvious to other people. Before you sit down to write, you have to practice distraction management. Flow follows focus, and you need uninterrupted concentration. And actually what the research shows is the brain focuses best in 90 to 120-minute slots of uninterrupted concentration. There's a 90-minute sleep cycle, REM cycle, we know about this. There's a 90-minute focus waking cycle. So I try to— your writing session should be at least 90 minutes long and manicure the environment. Turn off your cell phone, turn, you know, email goes off, absolutely turn off your messages, turn off anything, notifications, I think most importantly, have conversations with your loved ones, with your family, with your partner, with your boss, with your whatever. Like, you need this time uninterrupted. Research not done on writers, but on coders showed that even if you get into flow and you get knocked out of flow, it's a minimum of 15 minutes to get back in if you can get back in at all. So if you're only gonna block 90 minutes for writing and, you know, 15 minutes are gonna be wasted. You just get kicked outta flow 'cause somebody called you or something like that. That's insane. That's really a waste of your time. Yeah.

Oh, you said so many incredible things there and echoing even sort of, you know, I'm writing a sales letter right now and I have gone back and touched that thing so many times, so much so that I'm like, no, am I making it better? Am I not? But I really do believe that copy editing, like you said, is almost a more important skillset to develop because it, you know, it's one thing to get the words out, it's another thing to go back and say, okay, what's really necessary? And that, that does take a lot of creative energy. And so blocking out that time, and then I love what you said about sitting down and copy editing or editing what you wrote yesterday before you edit or start writing today almost. And 'cause you, you'll never feel, at least for me, I, there's days where I do not feel like writing, but if I go back and start reviewing and editing something I wrote, the day before or the day before that, I can immediately, or at least a lot more quickly, get into that state of writing flow. You talked about, and this was one of my questions for you, so I think it's a good place to go, is these ideas of flow triggers. And you mentioned focus follows attention or flow follows focus and distraction management. What other flow triggers are sort of required?

So deep concentration is the flow trigger that you're talking about? Novelty is a flow trigger, unpredictability, complexity. Complexity is perceptual vastness. You look up at the night sky, right? And there are— suddenly you realize each of those stars you're looking at could be a galaxy. And you're also looking back in time and et cetera, et cetera. And it overwhelms you. You have that experience of awe. That's the front edge of a flow state as well. So that's perceptual, that's complexity. The most important is what, is what's known as the challenge-skills balance. Flow follows focus. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you wanna stretch but not snap. So what does that look like writing-wise? I'll give you an example. For me, I write books. So when I'm starting a book, stretch but not snap, is about 500 words a day. Because I, the way I write, 350 words is an idea, 500 words is I've gotta transition to the next idea. And you know nothing is harder than a transition. So like I write 350 words, I can sort of do it really hungover, really tired, really in a bad mood, really whatever, it doesn't matter. I could pull 350 words outta my butt. 500, now that's a challenge, that can get hard. That's starting a book. Middle of the book where I sort of know more of where I'm going and what's going on, 750 to 800 words a day. End of the book where I actually know what I'm doing, it's 1,200 words a day or so. So it's a moving target. And the rough idea is that these numbers are not deadly accurate, and there's a long story behind where they came from, and ignore that. Just understand it's a metaphor more than, more than science, but it's an accurate metaphor. The science shows that when the challenge is, uh, 4% to 5% greater than our skills That's the sweet spot. So if you're shy, meek, timid, risk-averse, whatever, you're gonna be a little uncomfortable cuz you're outside your comfort zone. If you're a hard-charging Type A type, now you have got a problem cuz you'll take on huge challenges, 20, 30, 40% greater than your skills just cuz it wakes you up. That's cool. I do that too. Chunk it down. So what's in front of you though today, today's job is just 4 or 5% greater than your skills. Now, one other thing as a writer is this also means big picture, every one of my books requires more style, more talent, more research, more skill than the last one intentionally. Like, I don't just— like, I got a challenge to communicate these ideas, but there's the book you're holding in your hand, for example, Stealing Fire, that all of you just read. To write that book, I actually had to figure out how to increase the amount of factual density per sentence than I normally— normally my sentences are slightly less factually dense than what you read in Stealing Fire, but there's so much damn material in that book. I had to— so I studied Steven Pinker, who's a science writer who— with incredibly dense sentences, but they're fun. He doesn't lose his readers. There's still jokes in there. There's still stuff. You got to pay attention, but he does it in a fun way. And so when I was learning how to write Stealing Fire and training— like sort of training for the book, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out, stealing Steven Pinker's style. Like, where does he put his verbs? Where does he put his adjectives? How does he do it? How many— where's the commas? What's the grammar? All that stuff. And I had to play in his style over and over and over again for like 3 months until I started to figure out how we might be able to do it in Skin and Fire. There's a bunch of other writers that I sort of stole from, ideas from, in that book. Um, but like, I literally like spent months studying Steven Pinker when I realized that like it was gonna— or I was gonna bore the shit out of my readers.

Yeah, well, and it's funny that you mentioned that because as I was reading your book, I was like, oh my gosh, there's so much in here. And I love psychology and I love scientific research and I love learning it. And immediately I started thinking, if I were to write a book, I would be so uncomfortable by having to rise to that level. And I love that you said that idea of challenging yourself, because I think quite often as entrepreneurs, as marketers, as copywriters, we are scared of taking on new projects that challenge us because of whatever stories we're telling in our head about how we're underqualified or how we're not able to do that because we've never done it before. And going at it with the perspective of, okay, how can I push myself just enough so that this does feel a little bit scary and exciting, but that in and of itself is gonna help you retain focus and get into that flow state. And they talk about how even, you know, job satisfaction or happiness is always correlated with the level of challenge that people experience in their life. And so I, I love that you talked about that, and it also made me feel better knowing that you didn't go into writing this book, or I'm sure any of your others, feeling fully confident and comfortable, but knowing that you had to go out there and kind of do the research and find what you needed to be able to create something that was so well received.

Couple things to spin off of that that are worth pointing out. Anything that gives you focus for free is super— one, it's super important for flow, but two, it's super important for energy. Okay. Um, we spend most of our energy trying to pay attention to shit. Mm-hmm. Um, when we're curious, we don't spend any energy. It happens automatically, right? When you're scared, a little scared, it also happens automatically. So you want your next— want every one of your projects to scare you a little bit. Not too much that it's crippling, but we know, for example, flow, there's a sweet spot. There's a little bit of cortisol and norepinephrine, the so-called stress hormones and chemicals in your system in flow. So that's not— there's— you're It's not a total zen, like people talk about flow is bliss and whatever, and they get this like bliss junkie vibe, especially in the Mindvalley community that you came out of. And it's actually a total misnomer. In fact, to get into flow at a deep neurobiological level, you actually have to trigger the fight response. So there's fight or flight, right? Those two major responses at the front edge of a flow state. This happens for writers and you all know this. You've all had this experience where you're working on copy and you get to a point, you're like, fuck, It's broken and I'm annoyed. And then you're like, goddamn it, it's due. And you lean in, you're like, I just got— I'm gonna get it. Even if I have to go one word at a time, I'm gonna fix it one word at a time. We've all done this. And like 4 words later, you're in flow because you've leaned into that challenge and that testosterone and some of the other neurochemicals you get from leaning in are dropping into flow. I want to go back to one other question you asked, um, just because it's important because we're talking to writers. You asked about writer's block, and there's one thing, there's two things that I wanna say about writer's block. And one ties in with the complicated writing style we talk about in Stealing Fire, which is one of the reasons I go back and edit what I wrote the day before is I don't write. So, you know, sometimes painters paint in layers, I write in layers. So the first layer, first time I, it's who, what, where, why, when. I just like get the fricking action down. On the page. This is fiction or nonfiction, right? Second layer, I come back, then I put in the— that's where I put in the meat, all the facts, all the data, everything I need to support all that stuff. Finally, third thing I do, that's when the style goes on. One of the main things that happens with writer's block is you commit to a style at the front end before you figured out what it's gonna say. Style will dictate everything you can say. So once you lock into a style, you're already locked into what is the information in the piece. And if your style conflicts with the information in the piece, you're now in writer's block. So that's problem A, and that's why one of the reasons I write in layers, especially 'cause I'm a very stylish writer. So, and all, and my books all have slightly different styles 'cause I like to learn and I like to play. So I know like I'm gonna get locked in. Same thing with articles, same thing with ad copy, same thing with anything. Second thing is you're, and this is in "Stealing Fire" as you all know, Your brain is a giant pattern recognition system. It does it automatically. It will link like to like, but to get it to work, you have to know, as a writer, you have to know your starts and your endings. Where am I beginning? Where am I going? Your brain literally is designed to do pathfinding. It will literally link those two things together automatically. You don't have to do anything. You literally say, this is my start, this is my ending, I'm gonna go to sleep. When I wake up, I'd like them connected, and your brain will do that for you. This is how intuition works. This is how mapmaking in the brain works. This is how the, the hippocampus is essentially designed to do just this. So it happens automatically. There's a ton of stuff I can, more data I can talk about this with, but it comes built in is my point. People get stuck because they don't know where they're going. They don't know that you're ending. This is really dangerous when writing a novel. This often, like, you have characters, you know where you wanna start, you don't know where the fuck you're going. And you'll hear a lot of writers, big name, big name novelists talk about, I won't write, like, I won't write my first paragraph until I have my last paragraph, but line, it sounds psycho. But what they're really trying to figure out is what is my damn ending? Where am I going? 'Cause where am I starting? Where am I going? And everything else will sort of take care of itself.

I love that you said that. One of the things I talk so much about in copywriting is identifying the A to B. It's like, where are you taking people in promoting a product, a service, an offer? Because if you're not clear on what it is that your product or service does and how it can help the people reading it, then it really does feel like you're just sort of grasping at all these sort of random benefits without guiding people through this path of transformation or whatever it is that that you're selling. And this happens in personal development a lot where it's like, I don't know, people just feel better. And it's like, yeah, that's kind of hard to sell. So I love that you talked about that. And then the layering is so amazing. In fact, I'm trying to remember the line. There was one particular line in your book where I read that and I go, oh, that's so smart. It was an idea that you put into this beautiful phrase that was sort of punny and fun and totally my style of writing. But you don't just get there immediately. And I think that's what a big mistake that a lot of copywriters make is they try to lead with the stylistic flair. They try to be cute. They try to do an alliteration for the sake of doing an alliteration without just saying, okay, I'm gonna throw it out on the page. Then I'm gonna look for supporting evidence and tie that in where it makes sense. Then I can go through and finesse it and see where I can be clever or have that sort of stylistic approach. So that I think is insanely, insanely useful for writers going in starting any sort of project.

Well, it also gives you— if you're gonna edit, read what you did the day before, right? If it's day one, when you're coming back to it, you should be looking at a who, what, where, why, when. You should be layering. Now you know what's my job today. My job is to like put in more facts and make this thicker and, and believable, right? Right. Day 2 is when, like, for me It's when, like, when I'm done with it, my bullshit detector is no longer ringing. Like, I'm looking at what's on the page and I'm like, okay, you supported it. You believe that the skeptical journalist scientist guy reading this is comfortable. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. Believability. It's huge. Absolutely. I want to sort of bridge this idea of flow with a lot of what you talked about in the book Stealing Fire. You talk about this this term ecstasy. How would you define ecstasy as being different from flow, or are they the same thing?

So ecstasy, uh, from ecstasy, right? Ecstasy. Um, actually, I don't speak Greek, so you could be right, I could be wrong, and I could be correcting you and acting like an asshole, and I wouldn't even know.

Well, I did listen to the audio version of your book, and the guy did say ecstasy, so we need to make a call.

It's— I wrote the book and I'm operating with fake authority, but I don't have any actually. But so at the heart of Steel and Fire is this idea that all altered states of consciousness, and especially when you're dealing with the altered states that are north of happiness. So what's north of happiness? So there's psychedelic states, tend to, can be sometimes like, they can be go in the other direction, but they can be north of happiness. Flow is always north of happiness. Trance states, ecstatic states like speaking in tongues or meditative states. So underneath all of those altered states of consciousness, there are a bunch of very similar changes in the brain. There are big differences. In fact, I, we have a big research paper coming out that looks at the difference between flow, trauma, the trauma that leads to PTSD, and the psychedelic state. They have a lot of overlap neurobiologically under the hood. They're very similar, but they're radically different, right? But they're more similar than different, which is what's surprising to people. So, and historically, altered states, you know, whenever you're looking at huge innovation, you're looking at people tapping these states of consciousness. This is how creativity gets done. This is how innovation— this is just how the brain is designed to work. Um, so Steel and Fire is just, you know, a book about a whole bunch of different groups of people taking advantage of the same neurobiological technology that alters our consciousness and can sort of provide a bunch of benefits. There are certain things You know, if you talk to my partner in the book about this, he's a big fan of psychedelics. He's a big fan of a bunch of stuff that is completely uninteresting to me. Excuse me. I think psychedelics are fine. I think drugs are fine. I've got no moral judgment. Like, if you want to like shake the snow globe and have a vacation from your life with me, like, I don't care, seriously. But I do not think if your goal is creativity and practicality and things like that, I think there are better tools.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Thanks for listening to Flow Research Collective Radio. Before we dive back into our conversation, there's something to consider. It may be that today we are under-challenged. We're drowning in comfort. Now, in his book Antifragile, statistician Nassim Taleb pointed out something that's of key importance. Quote, undercompensation from the absence of challenge degrades the best of the best. The best Horses lose when they compete with slower ones and win against better rivals. Now, put another way, who we could be, or our highest potential, is squandered by safety, coddled by comfort. If you want to train with us at the Flow Research Collective, it will require boldness. But what's life without a little adventure, right? To learn more about how you can get more flow in your life and achieve your professional and personal goals in less time and with more ease, go to getmoreflow.com. If you're a good fit, we'd love to train with All the best.

So, but which is where I differ from, like, a lot of people read Stealing Fire and think I'm saying, oh, go out and just do tons of psychedelics. I'm really not. That's not my favorite tool in that particular toolkit. And I think we did this really cool with the guys at Imperial College London, got men and women. Guys to me is a gender-neutral term, so I apologize.

I say guys.

I try. I try really hard, but I've screw up all the time. But anyways, folks working at Imperial College London where they do all the brain imaging on psychedelics, we teamed up in a really wild study where we looked at in situations what's more important, flow or psychedelics, what's more useful, which situation. And, you know, psychedelics, if you want a spiritual experience, psychedelics are probably better for you than flow, for example. But if you're interested in innovation, anything practical, flow's the better tool that will much was really clear in the research.

Yeah, I love that. I think it's so fascinating looking at how psychedelics are becoming more mainstream and a tool for reaching that level of ecstasy and creative problem solving and mentioning working with Google and how they use that to do creative problem solving and the whole background with Burning Man. All of that is so fascinating. Fascinating. You mentioned that you think there are other tools to get you there faster. So what if, you know, like everyone listening here, you are sort of that solopreneur, you're working at, at home, and you want to be able to experience these possible altered states of consciousness using more accessible tools, you know, without going to Burning Man?

Flow's your best friend there. Um, you know, I would turn to my book, The Art of Impossible, which is a how-to playbook on flow. And if you want to go deeper, um, go to the Flow Research Collective. Um, there's a bunch of stuff for free and there's a ton of trainings. And this is, you know, what we do. And I could tell you, so that at the collective, uh, if you're not familiar with our work, we're a research and training organization. On the training side, um, we work in 130 countries So we work globally and we work with everybody from like professional athletes and Navy SEALs through C-suite executives with many, many Fortune 500 companies to like soccer dads and soccer moms and insurance brokers and copywriters, you know what I mean? Just everybody else. And the reason I think this matters, other than like, oh look, we're a big company, is we're data geeks. We measure fricking everything. And we're global in 130 countries. 50% of our clients are women. It's a really even split. So we have wildly diverse, globally accurate information on what works. That's why all that matters. And, and what I can tell you out of that is, um, on average, most people after about an 8-week training can see a 70 to 80% boost in flow in their lives. So to put this in perspective, McKinsey did that 10-year study that I talk about in Stealing Fire where they went around the world talking to top executives, how much more productive are you in flow than out of flow? And you got to take it with a grain of salt because it's subjective, right? They're not, they're not measuring it, it's just asking people. But after 10 years and thousands of CEOs, the average is 500% more productive. It's enormous. That's also another reason for why you can block 90 minutes for uninterrupted concentration. If you're 500% more productive than 90 minutes, your boss, your spouse, your kids, whoever it is that wants your attention, they're gonna get more of it if they leave you alone for those 90 minutes than if you're distracted throughout. Yeah.

Yeah. That, that, that leads me to a question. And you mentioned this in your book, sort of the difference between like creator mode and manager mode. I think it was that as entrepreneurs, and I think this is a real struggle, especially when people are just starting out and they have to wear basically every hat in their in their company, they're the creative ones, but then they're also the managers and they're, they're also the salespeople. Uh, how, how do you see it working, kind of switching between those roles? Is it really sort of just blocking out that time and going, okay, now I'm being creative and then later I'm gonna do all the manager stuff? Is there a system that you've seen work well?

Yeah, I, so you're asking a great question. We train a lot of organizations as well, right? Like Facebook, Accenture, Bain Capital. San Francisco Police Department, a lot of like wildly diverse organizations as well. And this is a question we get a lot, and there's a couple different answers. One, leaders in flow tend to drive their teams into flow. So in every organization we work with, there's individual triggers and then there's group triggers for flow, right? The shared collective version of flow, stealing firearms from the Navy SEAL group flow story. But You want to start with yourself, especially at the top. If for no other reason, flow is going to calm you the fuck down and make you a lot happier, right? Like, you can't effectively wear all those hats if you're redlined, especially if you're a creative, because too much norepinephrine, too much fear blocks creativity completely. The anterior cingulate cortex, which is the part of the brain that allows you to make big connections between far-flung ideas, it's a is at the heart of creativity. The more fear in your system, the more of the neurochemicals of fear, the more this part of the brain wants to be logical. When you're scared, the brain wants to be safe. Give me a solution that worked before 100% of the time. Don't try something new, which is exactly the opposite of what you're trying to do as a writer. So you have to take care of yourself. You gotta keep yourself— psychological safety for the person at the the top really matters. We don't often think about it that way, but it really matters. It was part of it's baked into the conditions that create flow. You can't have a high-flow environment without psychological safety. It's built into optimal performance. Um, but, uh, it is worth sort of talking about starting with leaders. I, the way I do it, I write from 4 AM to 8 AM. That's my time. You can't talk to me. Maybe if my assistant wants to talk to me at like 7:30, I'll have a conversation, but like anything before that, you know, everything's turned off and I'm— and then depending on the workload, I tend to, I'll tend to take a break, get some exercise, eat some food, and then the rest of the morning is managerial, right? I run a company, I have 100 people who work work with me, um, and, and blah blah. So I'll do that work then. Then I'll try to— something to reset my state. I'll take a nap, I'll eat lunch, get a little exercise, meditate, something to like reset my brain, change my state, take a long walk in nature. And then in the afternoon, I tend to work with my editors. So I'll go back and do another like 4-hour writing block, um, and then at the end of that, I'll call my CEO and we'll do company stuff. So that tends to— I run a company, I write full-time, and I run a company, and that's sort of how I balance it. But I don't try to mix the management and the creativity and the writing because one demands solitude, and I don't try to fake it.

Right. Yeah. And you can feel that. You can feel that when you're trying to fake it. You're like, okay, I'm just going to write something genius, and you're writing it, and you're like, this is so dumb. I can't do this. This. I love that. And I also love, and you've mentioned this before, that it really is about doing what works best for you. And you talk about this concept of personality and, you know, personality can't scale. And you could say all day long, these are the time blocks that work for me, but—

Oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. Very crucial point. This is like, this is what drives me crazy about most coaching performance. Everything is that that what you have is you have people who figured out what works for them and they want to train other people in it. And mostly you tend to break other people with this methodology in— because personality is coded by genetics and shaped by early childhood experience, radically impacted by culture and things along those lines. There's a lot of stuff that goes into personality. When you get one level deeper, which is the level we play at, which is neurobiology, we get under the psychology to the neurobiology that was shaped by evolution that's shared by everyone, that's what you're— that's sort of the level you want to play at. So what is true is that we tend to be one of three things. You're either a night owl, you're an early lark, I'm an early lark, or you're normal and you tend to wake up around 8 or 9 o'clock. You want— if your writing is the hardest thing you're going to do all day and the most important thing in your life, whichever is the point at which you naturally wake up. My wife, who started out her career as a novelist, is a night owl. She doesn't wake up till 4 or 5 o'clock. So like, we miss each other, right? If she's working on a writing project or a creative project, she's sitting down to work at 4 o'clock, which is, you know, I'm starting to think about ending my day around 4 or 5, and she's starting her day. And on my day, you know, her day is going to end around 3 AM, and and I'm— my day is going to start at 4 AM. So we'll have like an hour in bed together, you know, while we're sleeping. Hi, honey.

Ships passing in the night. Yeah. And I love that concept because there's so many— there's so many prescriptions out there, you know, and it's easy to go, okay, well, this is what I need to do to like fully optimize myself. And at the end of the day, nobody really knows yourself better than you. And so finding what works for you.

One of the things I make this point in, uh, we may make it in Steel and Fire too, I've seen Art of Impossible, and I think it's so important, um, because there's a lot of— I'm sure there are a lot of ass kickers who are current, you know, list joining us right now. Um, you seem like an ass kicker as well. And one of the things about— because peak performance is biological, if you read Art of Impossible, I always say this to people, your experience is not going to be like, oh shit, this is totally new. You're going to be experiencing, it's going to be, oh, I do this. Oh, I don't do this, but I should do that. See how I could do this now, right? Like because biology, everybody converges on the same solutions because these are the only solutions. It's, we're humans, we're hardwired to work in a certain way. So if you're a peak performer, top 30%, whatever, you're going to come to these same solutions. So, you know, it's really a question of sort of like fleshing out your knowledge and thickening it out. But like if you're, you know, if you're kicking ass, you're doing it because of these factors that these are shared among all, all humanity, which is the good news.

One thing that you talk about in the book which really hit home for me is this OS versus UI. And because you mentioned I'm an ass kicker and that's true, but sometimes it's so hard for me to do what I know I need to do for myself because I'm constantly just like pushing forward for the next thing. And my psychology really controls what I end up, you know, my biology, I guess you could say. And I love that you talk about this concept of becoming more of the UI and thinking of, okay, the thoughts that you have can become sort of a dashboard for you to see what's going on right now in your mind. And then how can you choose to do something different? And that to me is, you know, exactly how I feel so many days where I don't feel like going to the gym or I don't feel like doing all the things that I know logically I should do because I have so much on my to-do list or so much I have to to do. Um, do you have any thoughts on that and how to make that?

Yeah, so this is how I do it, um, and this is the way I think about it. Um, and I'm not saying you should do it this way, but I find it— I find this is a useful thing. The way I think about it is I work for the boss. The boss is the version of myself that has my long-term best interests at heart, because in the moment, unlike everybody else, I want the big high, the quick fix, The shortcut. And it—

this is—

we're homeostatic organisms, which means like we operate at a certain energy level. And anytime more energy is required, the body's pissed, the brain is pissed. It'll give you that energy. You have an endless supply. But literally, like, this is why we know like the thoughts in our head on the way to the gym are pretty terrible. Like, if you— if I was actually as lazy and tired at all the things that I think I am, I'm on the way right? This is my brain saying, no, no, no, you're about to expend a lot of energy. And are you right? Like, yes, I'm sure, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm a homeostatic organism and it does— that's going to happen no matter what. Like, I'm the— I'm super gritty. Doesn't change the fact that those thoughts are going to show up every time I got to go to the gym, right? I've just learned to sort of ignore them because I work for the boss. The boss is the one who writes the to-do list at the start of the day. Right. And when I win my day, I win my day by kicking everything off my to-do list. And right, that's the boss's job. The boss is, you know, it's, it's like making the grocery store list before you go to the grocery store when you're not hungry, after you've like read the Blue Zone Diet Handbook. And then you're like, okay, what I gotta shop for the next month, right? Not going to the grocery store with super stone and hunger. Right? Not gonna— different results.

Yeah, I love that. It's almost like your own ego.

Literally, that's how I think about it. I use that, um, in actual— like, I use that to advance in skiing. I tried to— at age 53, I have a book coming out in a couple of months that talks about this. I ran an experiment, Peak Performance Aging, where I taught myself how to park ski, which the discipline involves jumps and tricks and acrobatics. And I'd never park skied before in my life, and, um, I was like doing things that scared the ever-living shit out of me and could have killed me all day long for a really long time. And I kept— I worked for the boss. I'm showing up, I'm doing the thing, and it allowed me to like do these terrifying, like really big fear things all day long. So like, it works in writing, it works in other things for me at least. And there's some data from the science side, what works for everybody. Is that kind of distancing, getting— that's what meditation gives us too, right? You get a little distance from your emotions, right? This is just a different, slightly different tool. And, you know, it cracks me up more than, say, more of the spiritual tools. I, you know, if I can make myself giggle along the way, you know.

It's so practical. It's like, and that becomes so hard when you become your own boss because, you know, if you're especially a lot of the people listening here, whether they're in a 9 9 to 5 now, or they've left a 9 to 5. You're used to working for a boss. And then when you become your own boss, you're like, I'm gonna have all the freedom in the world. And then it doesn't take too long to realize, like, I am not, this is not working. I need to be accountable. So who am I accountable to? The boss. Like, just come up with that almost that alter ego.

The other thing, so side note on this, because this is the thing that is most important of this game, if you're gonna play the I work for the boss game, I have one another cardinal rule with this, which is if it goes on a to-do list, if I say it out loud or goes on a to-do list, it's a goal and I accomplish it. I will die before I don't accomplish it. And the reason is, this is so true if you work for yourself and you're a writer, if you don't keep your word to yourself, the minute you say, oh, I got to do this, your brain starts make looking for reasons not to. If you never break your word to yourself, if it goes on the list and you're going to get it done, you never break your word to yourself, your brain stops considering it as an option. So quitting, failure, all that stuff, if your brain doesn't even go there anymore, but if you literally break your word, oh, I'm gonna lose 10 pounds by New Year's, and you don't, right, you've broken a promise, maybe to other people, you've broken a promise to yourself, and yourself notices. Like, the brain pays a lot of attention to these things. So work for the boss, but if it goes on the to-do list, you have to be willing to die before you don't do it. Kind of.

Yeah. I love that because it really— I think when it comes to productivity, going back to, you know, what we were talking about earlier, a lot of people just are kind of waiting for this divine, like, now I'm going to feel like doing this. And That's not what happens. And I think having to ever like lean into that, like uncomfortableness, like you said, just go, no, I'm committing to doing this. And then that starts to breed.

Yeah. Let me— this is, I call this the Mindvalley creative fantasy. Literally like after your ex-employer, Vishen knows this. I tease him with this all the time, but I think this is so fricking true in that in spiritual communities, there's this whole idea. Now, by the way, I am mostly agnostic and probably an atheist. This, but I'm gonna still put it this way. Um, there's a lot of people in the world who think it's God first, uh, creativity second, meaning like I'm gonna find the bliss and then it's just gonna flow out of me. It's literally not how it works. You— it's flow first, God second. You can't— God is not like— people think, oh, I gotta do like 2 hours of meditation to get calm and all these things before I can write. It will not work that— it literally biologically works the other way around. You have to go flow first. So even if you're a spiritual person and that's your, your whole thing, let me put it in action sport terms. The easiest way to go to the hospital as a skateboarder, mountain biker, skier, whatever, is I'm going out for a flowy ride. This happens all the time. People go out for a flowy ride. Mountain bike is a classic example. Mountain biking is the most aggressive sport I've like, oh, not quite football, but it's like a full contact aggressive sport. And if you go out for a flowy ride, you're gonna get bucked by your bicycle and end up in the hospital. It is the easiest way to break a collarbone, um, is to go out for a flowy ride. If you go out to attack the trail, through that attacking, through that fight response, you're going to get testosterone, you're going to drop into flow, and suddenly it's going to get very, very flowy. But if you go in thinking it's going to be flowy No, it's gonna kick your ass and put you in the hospital. And it works the same way with writing, just not gonna put you in the hospital today. But I do, I always said, point of fact, used to think I was insane. At least once a book, I discover myself, I wake up, I find myself face down on the ground punching the floor. And I used to think, "Oh my God, I'm fucking nuts. If anybody sees me, I'll—" Then I heard an interview with David Foster Wallace before he passed. He said the same thing. He said, you know, once a book, at least I don't even know how it happens. I end up face down on the ground punching the floor and I'm like, shit, it's not just me. Wow. So, you know, there's, there's always that.

Yeah, there's always that. That's the goal now. We want to get there. Yeah, I love that we, that we spoke on that because I think that happens a lot. It's like, it's like we hear about the term spiritual bypassing in the spirituality communities, but it happens It happens when we're talking about, you know, focus and productivity too. And it really is something that just comes down to just doing the work and going at it with that mentality and then, you know, training that skill to be able then to get into flow. So you in your book and you wrote Stealing Fire in 2017. And so I'm really curious as we wrap up the interview is what are you most excited about in terms of evolving technology in the areas of consciousness hacking? Because, you know, you talked about the AI shrink and 3D printing drugs, and I'm like, what? This was 5 years ago.

The one that I care the most around— this is work we're actually actively doing at the Flow Research Collective. I'm gonna say a bunch of tech things quickly. Um, video games can drop people into flow, but not very effectively unless you're a total gamer and love games. Then they can really do They can get at 3 of the 22 flow triggers. Virtual reality can get at much more. So we learn faster in flow, 20, 250 to 500% faster than normal. Um, so we have teamed up with, uh, Limitless Flight, which is one of the most advanced VR companies in the world, uh, scientists at UCSF, much bigger team. We're trying to use VR to build a high-flow, sort of accelerated learning environment for worker retraining is our interest. It can be used for education. I don't want to get into a curriculum battle with parents, which is what happens when you develop an educational tool. And I'm like, I don't have kids. I don't want kids. I don't like kids. I don't want to argue about what we should be teaching our kids or your kids or anything like that. Like, somebody else can do that job. But worker retraining is interesting and a big problem in the 21st century, especially as we move to like autonomous vehicles and the entire trucking industry within 20 years needs like the largest employer in America and they're about to be out of jobs in the next two decades. So how do we retrain them and skill them up quickly and in a fun way, right? Like that's got to be hard enough losing your job and having to like learn a different set of skills later in life. So high flow and being, uh, inside VR, if we can do it right, it's distributed. So you don't have to have a classroom. You can be anywhere in the world. That's the tech I'm most interested in cuz it's the tech that like we are working the hardest on and it will, the path to that will also answer a lot of the questions I have about flow and a lot of the remaining questions we think we have about flow. There's probably a whole lot more that we can't see yet. But, you know, so that's the one I'm most excited about. Um, but, you know, I love that.

And, and there— it's tech that, that solves massive widespread, um, issues and problems that I think that— I mean, that's amazing and exciting to, to hear about. I'm also—

I'm a very low-tech person, so even though I'm working on this, like, it's— I You know, I tend to push personal technology far away, um, as far away as, you know, I use what I need to do my job, but I, um, I find that the trade-offs and the distractions and all that comes with it, I'm very aware. As a writer, I'm wary of, uh, the technology. As a scientist and researcher, I'm excited by it, but as a writer and a creative, I'm like, no, no, I'm gonna be a late adopter because I don't want it to break what's already working.

Yeah. And I do think the future is really combining humanity and creativity with the technology. And it's easy to lose sight of what we know to be sort of foundational truths when it comes to, you know, community and connection and engagement and the things that really require that, that human level of, of interaction and creativity. But I agree, the tech is exciting and, you know, It's exciting to talk about, uh, without losing sight of everything. Um, I think the problem with the tech is everybody—

the tech feels like it's like a pill. Oh, I'm just gonna use this technology and it's gonna fix it. And, um, nothing I know about human performance and creativity, like, it doesn't work that way, like, at all. And it still requires as much hard work, and the tech Often blinds us to interoception, our ability, like self-awareness for the body's own signals. And one thing as writers, like any career that involves pattern recognition— writing, a big one— pattern recognition is directly coupled to your ability for interoception. So they did this really crazy study with London stock traders, and they said they believe the best test for interoception is can you count your heartbeats? How many times does your heart beat in a minute? That's the standard interoception test. And they found that the London stock traders who could count their heartbeats better were much better at stock trading. Stock trading is all about pattern recognition. And they like, they were short-term, long-term, they beat the market, they beat everybody else. Writing is pattern recognition. So it's the same, you know, so the tech often divorces us from our bodies. And our bodies and being in touch with that. Literally, like if you're a writer, you're in the pattern recognition business. And if you're relying on technology to know how you're feeling on the inside or steer, that's— so I'm a little, I get nervous about what it does. I think that there's a place for it, but there's a whole lot sort of it's worth knowing to use it correctly, I guess. Yeah.

And it happens in the marketing world too. You know, people lose sight of foundational marketing truths about how you communicate to a group of people because of all this fancy tech and new trends and technologies and tactics that are, that are exciting. And then they go that direction and then they go, wait a second, and they're breaking what, what has always worked. And so I think that that's a, that's showing up in a lot of different ways in a lot of different industries. You mentioned talking before we started this interview that you have a program called Flow for Writers. Can you talk a little bit about that given, you know, the audience that is watching this is all writers?

Yeah, little like weird history, but Neil Strauss, who's another big name writer and has written a lot of New York Times bestsellers even though he's ghostwritten them for other people, but he's, you know, he's done a ton of great work and he's a good dude. And a great journalist. And it's gotta be 15 years ago at this point, 12 years ago, we were, we did a thing together. We were talking about like all the tips, tricks, and techniques, all the stuff that like sort of gave us our career that was underneath it. And we were talking about it, maybe we'll do something about it. And I just sort of got obsessed. He forgot about the idea like 20 minutes after, like, but I just sort of got obsessed and I couldn't stop thinking about like, What is it that I had learned that allowed me to, you know, do what I did and all that stuff? And so after like 5 years of thinking, we took all of it and put it into a training called Flow for Writers. So it's a 4-part training basically, digitally delivered. Part 1 is everything you need to know about writing itself, like how words work, how the science underneath, like words working in the brain. So how do readers' brains work? How do words work? Everything you need to know to, you know, write great copy. There's a second chunk on the business of writing, and it's, it's a little focused towards book writing if you ever want to write a book. But most people have no idea what goes into a book, how big the team is to actually make a bestseller, all that stuff. So what does it take to write a bestseller and put a book on the, on the New York Times bestseller list? I do that, and that's not knowledge most people like to share. For obvious reasons. Then we do a section on creativity itself. So creativity is a core skill for writing. How do you— what does science— can tell— science tell us about amplifying it? And finally, flow. And it's really focused on stuff we've been talking about today. It's the big flow picture, but it's very focused on— like, if you want to learn a ton about flow, take Zero to Dangerous, go to the Flow Research Collective. But if you just want to know what you need to know to be super dangerous as a writer, It's, it's more compact and it's also, um, cheaper than it's ever been because we, we were right about to record a new version and COVID happened, so it got recorded over Zoom. We're about to go into a studio and make it big and fancy and add a whole bunch of other stuff. So right now it's, it's less expensive than I think it's going to be in like 3 months. Um, so this is—

it's going away. This is it. So we will leave a comment below to, uh, sorry, I link below in the description if you want to grab your, uh, Flow for Writers program from Steven. Steven, thank you so much. This has been absolutely eye-opening, and I appreciate you being here, uh, to do this interview with me. My pleasure.

I like talking writing.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Summer's here, things are heating up, and ice cream is calling. But imagine that instead of just getting to enjoy ice cream, you had to run in ice cream business. Meet Nikki Schroeder, a recent graduate of Zero to Dangerous and Chief Revenue Officer of High Road Craft Ice Cream. Nikki runs the fastest growing ice cream manufacturer in the country. Before training with us at the Flow Research Collective, her life was understandably hectic. Running the company, taking care of her family required Nikki to be on her feet nonstop. As she put it after finishing training with us, quote, Zero to Dangerous has given me powerful peak performance tools for me to take back control of my life and find balance in my hectic lifestyle. Now, we're delighted that you got so much out of Zero to Dangerous, Nikki, and we wish you nothing but success with your business. If you're listening in, you want more control, balance, and flow in your life, come train with us. Just go to getmoreflow.com. That's getmoreflow.com. All the best.

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