Creativity & Flow: Tapping Into Flow By Visualizing Value with Jack Butcher

I think flow is almost like the ultimate version of what we're talking about because it's one word. It has these positive connotations. And I think it also has this— it's true, obviously everybody has experienced it at one point in time and there's a way to understand it from hearing one sentence of like when you hear flow state, you almost don't need to read a book. You don't need to understand, you don't need to unpack everything to get an inclination of what that means. Like, that sounds like something that I want to experience. 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, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Jack Butcher, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. Great to have you here.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Yeah, you got it. So I got a few bios for you here, Jack. So I'm going to read these offline, synthesize them a little bit, and then we'll add them back in. But to kick us off, I wanted to ask for your— whatever your sort of elevator pitch or synthesized breakdown is on Visualize Value, and then we'll dive into that brand, how you've built it, and your creative process a little bit from there.

Cool. So the elevator pitch for Visualize Value is constantly evolving, but in the context, I think, of this conversation, what it is, is kind of— it began as a kind of an art project, scratching a creative itch, like taking the things that I was learning and the things that I was trying to understand in order to grow my separate business at the time. Visualize Value just became this set of constraints that I would put all these ideas through and publish publish visuals that distill complicated ideas. And since that took hold, it's kind of taken on a bit of a life of its own. There's an education component to it. We built a community, we sell art, we do partnerships on some occasions with businesses, authors, things of that nature. But yeah, it's kind of media brand slash design studio slash education company. There's, there's a lot of different tentacles on it now.

Nice. Yeah, that makes sense. It's cool to see it flourishing outwards like that. When I first came across your graphics with Visualize Value, I think someone had just reshared a story or something like that, and I'm just going to share my screen here and show the audience a few of these because there's been a few of these. I mean, all of them are amazing, There's been a few where the visual has been so powerful and has distilled an incredibly deep, important concept so well that it's fundamentally changed my perception of the thing. I'm sure you're familiar with the one on— I mean, obviously you're familiar with the one on compounding. That seems to be one of the big, very popular ones. How do you go from taking an abstracted concept and then distilling it down to these sort of pieces which are just, you know, incredibly elegant and simplistic? What does that process look like?

The way in which these graphics are produced are not very production heavy, right? Like the idea is to communicate the concept with as little information as possible or as few visual clues as possible. So a lot of the work goes on in my head and I think there's a couple of different ways I approach it. Sometimes I'll discover the idea whether that's a quote or, you know, a passage of a book that I've read, and then try to kind of overlay some visual context on that idea. And that really comes from trying to dissect the logic of that idea. So you can kind of separate the way sentences are written or the way passages are written to try and isolate all of the components of the idea and then try and map them to visual symbols that are kind of— I really discovered this by accident. Like, symbols are so deeply embedded in our understanding of the world, right? Like, you can understand something from a set of symbols faster than reading a passage that's describing what those symbols are trying to explain. Arrows, circles, like simple geometric shapes that just carry all of this meaning. And I think have carried so much meaning throughout our civilization and culture, that you can kind of tap into some of those, like, foundations of meaning and compose them in new and different ways. So one way is to literally take a sentence and start to try and isolate, you know, is there a contrast here, or what would I need to add to this idea in order to emphasize a certain piece of it? There's a few different mechanisms, and sometimes you kind of use similar mechanisms to, to say different things. So comparison is a big one where this is kind of before, after you contrast these two situations and then there's time. The one we're looking at right now, it's like if you're plotting the behavior of something across an axis, you can start to point at different moments in time. And everybody has this like intuitive understanding of a timeline or like the plotting of an idea across time. And then you can make these interesting observations in that context. There's, there's probably a couple of dozen like models that you can take and like iterate on where you're either— yeah, those two examples, contrast and time, are a couple of the most heavily used. I'll be able to see more if I looked at the grid, but there's And then other times I'll just kind of have this almost arrive at the visual first where there's whether or not it's like instinct or a bunch of experiences that kind of add up together to become this thing that you can then overlay on an image. I think what's true about a lot of these is they can represent maybe, you know, you could write 100 different captions, or you could put 100 different quotes against a lot of these and they would remain true. And I think that's what makes the most effective ones the most effective, is that they represent the truth in an abstract way. And then words kind of give them this additional context or this different way to look at this interpretation of truth. So it's definitely not an exact science, but the things that I've noticed over time that tend to be true are the, the ones that feel like you could write a lot of different interpretations of. And we've tried this a couple of times where we just post something and ask for people to interpret it and caption it themselves. And I think through kind of training people's perception on what visualized value is, there's almost embedded meaning in some of the symbols that we use continually. So a wordy answer, but it's kind of a combination of reverse engineering it by thinking about the logic in a statement. And then other times it's just arriving at this depiction of an idea that you've found to be true in a lot of different contexts.

Mm-hmm. That's a great breakdown. What has it done, Jack, for your ability to deeply integrate concepts when you go from from the general idea to distilling it down to kind of identifying the core essence, to then visualizing its core truth in a very minimal way. How does it deepen your understanding of whatever the thing is that you're trying to visualize?

I think that same, almost the same answer where you're trying to disprove the thing that you've drawn. So you come to this visual conclusion or you have this output as a visual and then asking whether or not it holds up in all these different circumstances. And I think some of my I hopped around so many different jobs and environments when I was in my 20s. And I think that has, you know, retroactively I've realized that that gave me all these different varied perspectives on things that allow me to kind of stress test some of these ideas. Is this true? Was it true when I was in this environment? Was it true when I was in that environment? Is it true now that I'm trying to do my own thing? And or is this true in you know, the context of building a business? Is this true in the context of relationships? Is this true in the context of X, Y, Z? So I think a lot of it comes down to reflecting back on things that I've experienced or trying to use those frameworks to test new ideas, run new experiments. And the more they hold up, the more that deepens my belief in the fact that they represented something real or true.

One thing I find personally is that if a truth or a principle or a heuristic can be taken from merely conceptual to visual, I'm able to think about it more easily, reference it more easily in my mind. And thus—

Like a shorthand.

It's a shorthand. Exactly. And make decisions that are aligned to it. More easily. So there's actually decision-making utility in, you know, distilling down truths to visuals. And I'm curious if there are, you know, 1 to 3 of the Visualize Value visuals that you've done that have most impacted your behavior or your thinking or your decision-making that come top of mind.

There's definitely a few. One should be close to the top of the Instagram page right now. It's called keep going, that this is pointless. There's like a huge inflection point. This idea of— there's a couple ideas in here. There's obviously consistency, compounding, like being unaware, especially when you're building a business digitally and you're like kind of creating this network that doesn't immediately return a result. You have these huge inflection points where you know, something hits a critical mass or you tap into something true at scale. This is one of the things that I refer back to when maybe you are in the period between hitting on those truths, right? Like the consistency and the continual experimentation is the behavior that creates those things. And we often kind of want to detach those things and think we're just going to wake up and have a brilliant idea every day. And this is true in the work that I've done for Visualize Value too. There are so many power laws at play where there's, you know, maybe the top 1% of these visuals are 100 times more resonant than the 99%. And keeping that in mind, but still knowing that you have to go through the process of producing the 99% to get to the 1% is something that I always, you know, this visual is stuck in the back of my mind for that reason. There's a bunch of visuals I did for Naval Ravikant's Almanac, and almost every single one of those is like burned into my— I don't even know what you would call it, but my like the visual part of my brain can recall those when I need to.

What are some of those? I'd love to hear some of those.

So one of them is optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed. So you kind of there's a— it's like a 2x2 and there's in the top right, there's like obviously one person represented and then in each other corner it's crowded. And this idea of kind of holding those two positions together at the same time puts you just in a place where you're going to try different things for a longer time. And that has served me very well in building Visualize Value and previously, but Naval's ideas were definitely kind of fundamental to leaning into this as hard as I did. And a lot of what he talks about is just finding that edge through understanding your unique experiences and having the ability to package that in a way that demonstrates what you can do so you don't even have to explain it, right? That takes a long time and Until you hear other people talk about it, you maybe just don't believe that it can happen, or it just feels like a, you know, there's definitely an element of the, what do they call it, survivorship bias, you know, the plane with the holes in everywhere but the engines that came back from World War II. So there's an element of that, but there's also these truths in the way the world works that that if you can find that edge and press on it, then you can work at the apex of your abilities and preferences and all of those good things. So those are definitely burned in my brain too.

There's a fun story in the Steve Jobs autobiography by Walter Isaacson where he talks about Jobs starting NeXT after leaving Apple and paying $100K to Paul Rand to develop the logo, and Paul Rand's conditions were that he gets, you know, 100% autonomy in the entire process. He serves up one logo with no revisions and it's used. And it worked out, it worked out great in the end, but it was kind of a high-stakes commitment for Jobs to make. And I'm curious, when you think about someone like Paul Rand and the amount of time and effort he puts into creating one logo, how much time does it take you to build these visuals? What does it actually look like? Maybe you give us a breakdown break down on that in terms of hours? And, you know, are you mapping this stuff out with a pen and paper? What does that whole creative process look like? And then just to add a final bit onto the question, do you find you're able to access flow when you're doing that as well? Maybe you could talk a little bit to what that experience is like also.

Yeah, for sure. So again, I think there's a couple of different ways in which it comes about. There are a few, there are a few things that I've worked on in the past few years that just have deadlines and you have to finish them, like illustrating a book. You can't just sit around and wait for the idea to hit you. And I think that the beauty of having something so narrowly defined as the visualized value style is the constraint it puts on you is the conceptual work. Like the creative component of it is forced into expressing the idea as opposed to making all the infinite number of decisions you can make as a graphic designer where you have typefaces, canvases, colors, textures, images, all of that stuff that the constraints that are placed upon you, it kind of— it feels to me like a fast track into the most accessible version that I've ever experienced of flow state. The only other thing I would compare it to is skiing. I don't know how often you use this example, but it's like you have these two things strapped to your feet and the hill is pointing down you're going to— you just do it, right? At a certain point, it just comes to you. And obviously creative work and sitting in front of a computer or any canvas is so much more— so much the optionality of it or the potential combinations of output are so insanely varied. And I almost stumbled into this, but having something that keeps you restrained in some way or gives you a certain amount of— it forces your creativity into a certain channel that helps me feel like I'm making progress in a, in a faster sense. There's also kind of installing that set of constraints helps you arrive at these things as you're just going about your day as well, right? When you've done a certain amount of reps of something, the ability to translate things that are happening to you in real time through those, through all those repetitions you've done, through all of the like cognitive load that you've processed. I think it's hard to even describe a lot of it. It's just, it's just I could read a sentence or someone could tell me an idea and I'll just arrive somewhere close to being able to put that down in a different way. And sometimes honestly forcing, like trying to sit down and force work out is really, really difficult. And like as soon as you go for a walk, get in the shower, do anything that isn't sit in front of the page, whatever is going on in your brain, which you would be able to describe much more articulately than me, just allows it to get to a place where it's like, I don't know, processing something and arriving at a conclusion much faster.

There's a quote from Marcel Duchamp. I think that's how you pronounce his last name. On one of your recent posts, which is, "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone." It reminds me of what you're saying. It also reminds me of flow. Flow is almost a companion that occurs and that elevates the creator or the artist when they're engaged in creating. And yeah, I'm curious what you make of that quote and then the visual that you built around it.

Yeah, so that idea to me is this, there's like a romantic way to interpret it and then there's a very like pragmatic way to interpret it. It's this idea of making something that resonates with someone else. That's the goal from a like productive perspective. And on the romantic side of it, it's like you want to give somebody just enough to arrive at an epiphany that they feel like they made the jump themselves. You know, like I look at that visual and I read that caption and then all of this experience that I have like rushes on top of that visual and a light bulb goes off in my brain. I'm like, that's true. So trying to create these like epiphanies, that's the job of the work in my— the way I think about it. And I learned this in a like hyper-commercial environment is selling pitch work, you know, millions of dollar contracts for agency businesses and walking people through these stories to justify why we would spend X, Y, Z on putting this message out to market. And you have to build that thing up from scratch. It's like, okay, this is true. So if this is true, we should do this next. And then if this works, then we should do this. And it's almost an engineering process, but all the variables are much more fluid, right? So it's like people's experiences and like language and art is very different than writing code and getting a machine to run. But there are also similarities in many ways where you're, you're trying to build upon the last idea that you convinced somebody of. So, um, that Duchamp quote, and he himself was like hyper-conceptual artist and had a bunch of critics saying that what he did isn't art, but the even eliciting that reaction is the art itself, right? That's the, I think, the amazing The amazing thing about people who understand what they do on that level or are comfortable with their work being misinterpreted because the misinterpretation of it or the response to it becomes a part of the work itself. So I hope to be even like remotely in a class like that, to be able to put an idea out into the world and help somebody reach a conclusion, have a response, you know, even push back on it and say, this isn't true for me. That's a privilege to do that.

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

Love to talk a little bit, Jack, about what it was like transitioning into creating, you know, your sort of digital monopoly. Could you give us a bit of background on what you were doing beforehand, what the first year transitioning into this world looks like? Maybe there was overlap with working a job, for example, and then how you got to where you're currently at, because I know it's a really interesting journey from our clients' perspective.

Yeah. So as I mentioned before, my early career was graphic design. I studied graphic design. And worked in a tiny New York graphic design agency when I started my career. And my first boss was a massive mentor to me. He was a creative director with a writing background. So I came out of school with a visual, like, um, my credentials were basically visual design, graphic design, and getting into a tiny environment as well. This is— I attribute a lot of my early learning to being so close to the principal of a business that was like helping me understand every decision that was being made. But he had a writing background. So the pairing of writing and visuals, the idea of a like the concept being 90% of the work, that's something that really I was exposed to. Could you break that down? Yeah, sure. So, so some of the most compelling, amazing advertising ever created is production-wise, not that, not that heavy of an investment. I think of like an Apple Think Different campaign. The stuff that really sticks in your brain has so much more to do with the power of the idea than the amount of money invested in the production of the idea. And that's not— they're not mutually exclusive. I'm just saying the arriving at that concept and that idea is where the value of this thing lies. And then executing against that. If the idea is good, you can write it on a napkin or draw on a napkin, scan it in and put it up in Times Square and it will work. The importance of like the idea being this, this driving force behind everything you do and spending the work and the time required and the Like being able to challenge each other when something isn't quite good enough. That's definitely something that I'm very grateful for. Early in my career was just getting kind of hammered when I didn't do it, didn't show up with something compelling. One memory I have was I walked up to the table to review some work I was doing. I was like, well, this isn't ready. It's not very good. And the guy told me, he's like, why are you showing it to me then? Like, don't, don't walk up here and tell me that the work isn't very good, right? That's Just tell me I'm not ready. Let's reschedule the thing. And this was an internal thing, so special circumstances. But a lot of those, a lot of those interactions I had early on really emphasized the power of the idea. So writing, design, putting them all together and bounced around 10 or so different agencies after that. So a bunch of amazing experience worked on so many different— the cool thing about agency businesses is like one day you're working on a chocolate campaign, the next day you're working on like tyres, the next day you're doing— that's just crazy, like the variety of experiences you have and industries and people you meet. So went through all of that, probably 8 or 9 jobs in New York, and then got to the point where I was high enough up in an agency where I was being exposed to the economics of the businesses. So up until that point, 7 years in, you're just like, here's the work, do the work, show up to the meeting, present the work, go home. And then I got to the point where I was like, you're in the meetings where they're discussing the budget, they're putting together the plan for delivering the work. And I'm like, hang on a minute, how much are you getting paid for this? And this is— I'm like mid-20s, mid— yeah, mid-20s, late 20s. And I had that kind of idea then where I was like, I'm getting paid this and they're making this, so why don't I just do this by myself? And there was definitely a ton of arrogance and naivety in that. And like mid-20s energy, there's a lot of factors at play right there where I had came to that conclusion. And so I did, I left, started my own agency, got a bunch of clients from basically all the connections I'd made in the agency worlds for, from 7, 8 years before and just burned out almost immediately. That got like 6 to 9 months into it and realized that I would basically have to recreate the businesses that I was a part of. And there was a reason why every business I worked at previously functioned that way, right? Service these massive clients, you have to have 5 people to answer the phone. You have to like have legal counsel to do X, Y, and Z. You're just like, they're the size of the businesses you're serving is basically you have to absorb their inefficiency and build yourself around them. So you have to create something that works differently if you want to escape that kind of job and life. And I had no desire to hire 10 people and, you know, get an office in New York, things like— I just didn't want to do that. So this was where I started to hit the books, try and figure out where I was going wrong. And this is where I found— this is where I first read Stealing Fire. This is when I started to read Naval. This is when I started to read Seth Godin, Nassim Taleb. And all of these ideas I'd never been exposed to started to help me understand what I was— not necessarily what I was doing wrong, but how I was, uh, like how you can augment all the things you know in a way that's way more, um, pointed. So the ideas I discussed that Naval talked about, where if you want to be small and lean, you have to get incredibly focused. You can't be everything to everyone, even if you have this deep network of people that want to work with you. If you're going back to zero every time you work with them, you're not getting this compounding upside that you can by dialing in, getting focused, being known for something very specific. So Visualize Value basically came out of maybe 5 or 6 iterations of the agency business. So started as everyone to everything to everyone. You have a creative project of any description, I'll do my best to figure it out. If not, I'll hire someone. Then started to strip that down and it eventually became, we will help you visualize value. So I— it took me a long time to notice this, but the majority of the value that I created in my career was internal. It was like B2B. Here's this story that we've put together to get you to buy into a long-term relationship with this agency. So I exclusively focused on that part for probably a year where I would work with founders of businesses to take their IP and turn it into these, for the most part, these like 12-slide, 12 visuals that depicted the way they ran their business, the way they thought about the work they did, the way a client should work with their business. There was a lot of different variations on it, but essentially making these intangible ideas tangible for them, for them to use in whatever context they needed to use it, raising money if they were selling to enterprise, whatever it was. So then once I figured that out, did that a few times, you know, manually kind of scaled back into the client side of things, but way more controlled because all the deliverables were my— like I was determining what was going to happen before going into it as opposed to just begging people to work with them. And then Visualize Value, the social component came out of that as like a lead generation exercise to begin with. So I was like, how do I get more clients? Okay, I'm going to visualize ideas that may be a bit sexier than the stuff I was doing for clients, which was like, you know, a 3PL shipping, the logic that exists within a 3PL shipping business, like putting that on Instagram. I don't think many people are going to respond to that. So I started to think about, well, what are the ideas that really led me here and that helped me like make these changes in my business and the way I think about building this thing. And those served as this conduit between people that were also trying to articulate what they're doing. So worked as a, worked as a lead gen for the client side for a little while and then started to understand that there was a demand for this skill specifically. So how do you learn how to visualize value? That was the first product that we brought out on the education side. There was a couple like little experiments before that. And then, yeah, so, so trying to get— trying to articulate the process of how do you take an idea, strip it down to its logic, visualize it, and then use that for whatever it is you need to use it for. And then, yeah, Visualize Value became— we added another product after that. There was basically a meta layer on top of that. So it's like if you have this skill that's taken you 10 years to learn, how do you package that into a curriculum that transfers that knowledge to other people? And all alongside that, the visual, the visual component of the business is growing. And we sold some art. We do, we do do occasional partnerships on with businesses still, but more like long-term equity deals, stuff like that. We definitely do. And the book illustrations is another piece that has become more— that to me feels like one of the— like one of the most amazing moments in this whole journey was doing that in the Evolve book. Just like having had those ideas be so influential, influential, and then that kind of coming back full circle was incredible. And I think trying to create these visuals that represent ideas that are so powerful that they make you want to read the thing and get closer to the nuance of the truth underneath this thing is, is time well spent. So that's definitely where I would like it to go longer term is just making knowledge, education more accessible. And there's just so many different ways to do that. And it comes down to hours in the day calculation for sure. But that's, that's more where it's going on the media side. So yeah, service to product to then media as time goes on.

Nice. Amazing. Thanks for that breakdown, Jack. You mentioned Seth Godin, Nassim Taleb, Naval Ravikant. I think of all of those guys as incredibly strong at originating and communicating concepts and ideas that end up being very sticky and influential. And one thing I've found really fascinating over my career has been observing the level of resonance in the marketplace with flow. We've veered off that at times and it's just got this continuous enduring resonance that is so deep and significant. I'm curious what you think makes that the case with a concept or an idea. What makes it enduring and resonant in a deep and powerful way? Almost like idea-market fit.

That's a great question. I love, I love this, like just this line of thinking in general. And again, like thinking back to my background, advertising, marketing, branding, packaging is so much of this. And I was so, so influenced by that. And to be able to apply those skills for ideas that aren't, you know, just selling endless amounts of consumable nonsense is in my mind, a much more rewarding way to spend your time. But I think flow, I mean, it's almost like the ultimate version of what we're talking about because it's one word. It has this, it has these positive connotations. And I think it also has this. It's true. Obviously everybody has experienced it at one point in time and there's a way to understand it from hearing one sentence of like, when you hear flow state, you almost don't need to read a book. You don't need to understand. You don't need to unpack everything to get an inclination of what that means. Like, that sounds like something that I want to experience. Flow is just like, has this like embedded positivity in it. And I think that's probably one of the—

to build on that, there's an experiential resonance with it. Everyone's been there. And so everyone's like, oh, that's like that.

There's a name for that thing.

Exactly. There's a name for that thing. Exactly.

It's like the— I don't speak German. I did learn German in school, but I'm sure you've heard, like, they have words for the, you know, the most abstract of feelings or concepts or like these really niche things. And flow is kind of, I guess, rides that line of everybody has experienced it. But until you have like a rapper for it, like the language that wraps that experience, you don't think of it as something that you can explore deeper, or you don't think of it as something that has all these like layers to unpack. And Simulabs, Antifragile, does incredible.

Another different but similar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's— I'm just looking at my bookshelf here. That's, that's definitely up there. Black Swan, another one of his. Incredible. And Yeah, I've tried to learn as much as I can from those examples too, even in the products that we've put out where especially when you're competing on the internet, it's like you have, you have like a millisecond to transfer as much information as you possibly can. And language is, it's like a universal tool, but there's such a huge difference in the way people use it. And like, there'll be a really— there would be a really inelegant way to explain what flow state is and package teachings or anything to do with flow state in a really clunky way, even if the material that sat beneath it was one-to-one exactly the same. The articulation of flow and the compactness of it is just going to spread that idea at such a more. Yeah, it just compounds so much faster. And there's this— I think you mentioned this— it's like there's this cultural, there's this idea market fit where like the consensus exists even outside of you. So you're kind of tapping into the fact that this thing is bigger than, bigger than all of the people studying it or talking about it or trying to help people better understand it. And that's Yeah, I think that's just some of these ideas. I'm trying to think of another one that would make sense here. I just like— there's a diagram that's coming to mind where there's like these concentric circles rotating and like fashion is on the outer layer and it's going as fast as you can imagine. And then the like core of this set of concentric circles are— it's truth. It's the things that remain true regardless of, you know, the bumps on the outside of the the diagram. So flow feels like it's pretty close to the core there. It's like a core component of the human experience that has found its idea market fit or the language that describes it in such a profound way that I don't think it's going anywhere as an idea.

Right, right. Yeah, that contributes to its enduring nature. The final question I've got, Jack, is what resources or books or mentors been most useful to you in developing your, whatever the— Is there a word you use for this sort of skill of distilling concepts into visuals? Is there a term for that yet? If not, we got to coin one.

Well, I just call it visualizing value.

Well, there you go. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. What books, what resources have been most useful at helping you refine and hone that skill of visualizing visualizing value?

Well, that's, that's a good question. I think the, the experience that I've had has been much more informative in that sense, like just having to take things that are intangible and make them tangible in so many different contexts. The other thing I'll mention is if you have, if like you start your career as a designer or as somebody whose reputational currency is visual, because you have to produce things in order to move through the world you occupy. So if you go to a job interview, they don't care about your degree, they don't care about where you went to school, they don't care really who you know. It's like, hey, can I see your portfolio? What have you produced? And just going through the reps there permissionlessly too. Like, there's been all these different moments in time where I've realized I don't actually need anybody's permission to redesign that thing or put forth my suggestion for how this thing should work. And I can't name a single resource that pointed me to that. But the idea of doing things without permission in that context has been huge. And then discovering the ideas that I discovered when I discovered them. This is like the— I think this is a, you know, 10,000-year-old proverb. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. You just get to this breaking point where I felt at least like I was putting an inordinate amount of effort into this thing and not getting remotely the upside back that I thought was commensurate with the effort I was putting in. And that stuff was really only a few books of ideas away or a few tweets. The Naval, how to get rich without getting lucky tweet story, I think that's pinned on Naval's Twitter, is honestly, there's 10 books worth of knowledge in that, in those 20, 25 tweets. And if you read that when you're struggling with the things that he's describing as a solution to the problem, that to me was just the, like, the hit over the head where I was like, oh, clearly I'm just doing this. I'm just doing this wrong. Like, if you have evidence that you can solve a problem for somebody or contribute positively to a situation in, in one context, then your job becomes like, how do I package this in a really compelling way and how do I have the discipline to stick to that and not say yes to the next thing that comes along that's going to take me off in a different direction? And that's— I know I'm veering off the question you asked here, but that to me has been the habit or the instinct that's been the hardest to shut down over all of the years where you start to find a little bit of traction when you're focusing on something, and then you can, you can be distracted by a thing that you're already good at that might honestly be like hold decent rewards in the short term, but it's like straying back into that world that you're trying to get away from. I've just gone through that process so many times to the point where now it's like I'm also— I should have mentioned my wife on this podcast because her like ability to sort of correct me back into the lane of focus where I think sometimes you need somebody outside of you that can basically, you know, call bullshit on the things that you're— these loops you get into to try and justify doing something that you shouldn't be doing, or you have evidence that you don't need to go back and do. And books can get you kind of, you know, books can get you there to some extent. But so much of this stuff is like honestly reflecting on the experience you have and you're going to make a ton of mistakes. And yeah, the, yeah, the process of just putting stuff out into the world relentlessly and just listening intently to the feedback you get, that's been the thing that's accelerated everything. But all of the things I mentioned— Naval, Nassim Taleb, Seth Godin— if you read everything that those guys have written, you'll be in good shape.

Yeah, you're way ahead of the pack, that's for sure. Super, Jack. Well, thanks so much for sharing your knowledge and wisdom with us. And where can people learn more about Visualize Value and all the work you're doing and offering?

So you can go to visualizevalue.com, and then for anything current or coming up would be Jack Butcher on Twitter, Visualize Value on Twitter. That's it.

Super amazing, boss. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Now, your time is priceless, and in terms of dollars and cents, valuable. Whether you're an entrepreneur, executive, or a manager, you're paid well, but when you're short on time, you end up in a tailspin. Now, if you want to get more out of less time, just go to getmoreflow.com. We'll show you how. Because you know that when you manage your time well, you can move mountains. But your time is like sand slipping between your fingers. Your to-do list grows, but time doesn't slow. You'd think that with less time, you'd work harder or smarter, but a scarcity of seconds makes you prone to procrastinate, which makes things worse. But you can end this time trouble right now. Here's how: make more out of less through flow. You don't actually need more time. You already have enough. What it takes is switching to a higher gear of performance to get more out of that time. Now, here at the Flow Research Collective, we study the human nervous system when it's functioning at its absolute best. There's a peak state you can tap into with reliability. It's called flow, or being in the zone. It's an optimal state of consciousness where you feel your best and perform your best. And in it, time seems to slow down. Now, if you want to access flow consistently and reliably, just go to getmoreflow.com. Our protocols come from research out of Harvard, DARPA, and Stanford, and others. Our founder, Stephen Kotler's work has been praised by the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Clinton, and Vishen Lakhiani. We draw from over 25 years of flow science to train a wide range of peak performers from Navy SEALs to Fortune 100 executives. And because our training is grounded in neurobiology, it works for everyone. So if you're interested, just go to getmoreflow.com for all the details. That's getmoreflow.com. 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.