Finding Flow Through Passion & Purpose

People come to the Flow Research Collective because they want more productivity, better performance, those sorts of things. And that's great. But what I get in the bargain is increased empathy. Flow expands that boundary. When we drop into flow, creativity spikes 400 to 700% above baseline. The happiest people on earth are the people with the most flow in their lives. If you want overall life satisfaction, if you want well-being, if you want peace, you're going to have to break the addiction to easy dopamine. Once you have passion, it's a great motivator that happens automatically. Get tremendous amounts of focus for free. You couple your passion to something outside yourself that you'd like to see fixed in the world, right? Something bigger than yourself that will help the planet, help other people, that sort of thing. That's purpose. Build passion slowly. Build purpose slowly. And a lot of people are looking for it, and purpose is they want it really fast. 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.

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 your oldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Doris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

My guest today is a New York Times bestselling author, author of many incredible books such as Stealing Fire, "The Art of Impossible: The Rise of Superman," and new book, "Nar Country." He is an award-winning journalist, and he is the founder and executive director at the Flow Research Collective. And he is an individual that is a world-class leading expert at the human high-performance state of consciousness known as flow. Steven Kotler, thank you for coming on the show, my friend.

Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

People tune into this podcast because they're trying to become the best, most self-realized, actualized version of themselves. And there's this Taoist maxim that actually came across recently that I absolutely love. And it says that the master does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone. And what I take from that is that there is a place within ourselves, there's a state of consciousness that we can have access to, where the sense of being a doer ceases to exist, what I feel like is flow and what you share so much about. And so I would love for you to share how the possibility of reaching the state of consciousness within ourselves where the, the feeling and the sensation of being a doer can kind of stop, but yet you are extremely effective in the world and in what you do in your physical activity. And so do you feel like that is an accurate description of what flow would be?

I'm going to give you an uneasy answer: yes and no.

Sure.

So, um, let's start with the no, um, and then work our way to the yes. Um, but it's, it's an interesting question. You're asking a good question. Um, so, and this is— you're actually jump to an argument that's sort of been at the heart of flow research for a while, which is neurobiologically, if you look in the brain, flow activates a number of networks. Cognitive control network, which is what allows you to focus really intensely and cut out the world, which is one of the things that happens in flow, right? You stay very focused on the task at hand. The other network that's active is the goal-directed network. So the goal-directed network is only active when we're active. So the interesting question about the doer doing nothing— is he talking about flow? And what's interesting about this is, and I spent— I started when I came into flow, my early work was on what you call the neurobiology of spiritual experiences or mystical experiences. And I was looking at flow. So I spent a lot of years scouring the world for, okay, what was flow called in this culture? What was flow called in this culture? What is it called in this? Right. That sort of thing. And we know, for example, flow isn't enlightenment. It may be closest, if you're going to use a term from Eastern philosophy, to what the Japanese describe in the Zen tradition as satori, a brief awakening, because it's a state and not a stage. And enlightenment is a stage, right? So there's this argument of, is flow always a goal-directed, action-based state versus like meditative trance states, which are much quieter, right? And this has been a longstanding argument. The European side of the argument loves to say No, you can have non-goal-directed flow. So that's where their position is. On the American side, we tend to say, no, no, no, it's always goal-directed flow. I don't know where I come down yet. I'm not actually sure. I just know that this debate has been going on for 25 years. It's probably gonna still go on. That said, the similarity between sort of deep meditative states and flow states are neurobiologically also very, very similar, right? So the things that are producing that stillness inside— so for example, why does that happen in flow? One of the reasons it happens is because your emotions are almost completely turned off in flow. Martin Seligman, sort of one of the, one of the godfathers of positive psychology, uh, in his book Authentic Happiness points out that flow, uh, you need emotions to modify behavior, right? That's what emotions do. They tell us to act this way or act that way and things like that. Um, which is one of the reasons people say don't hang on to your emotions, especially in spiritual traditions, right? Because they're literally meant to be lightning-quick behavioral signals that are over and gone in a second. They're not meant to linger. Um, but all of that gets turned off in flow, because if one of the things that happens in flow, right, is every decision, every action leads seamlessly, perfectly to the next, right? It's And if you don't have to course-correct behavior, if everything's already perfect in what you're doing, you don't have any need for emotions. So the entire— the limbic system, the amygdala, all that portion of the brain gets what they would call downregulated, turned down. It's really quiet, right? That's where the stillness comes from. You can get the same thing in meditative states. And the deactivation of the prefrontal cortex that you get in flow, you can also get in certain meditative states. So there's a lot of overlap. And the one question is this goal-directed, this action question that you're asking, and it as of yet not solved. That was sort of a really long way of saying, I don't know.

Well, you picked— there's a lot of things that you, that you touched on that I want to pick up on. I think that when people have experienced or taste what flow is like, there's this lack of a sense of self.

Totally.

And so I think it can kind of feel analogous or very similar to where people have these spiritual experiences and they feel their inherent interconnectedness. There's a sensation of the world, but there is not this me that is so rigid, that is the receiver of it.

Yeah. And that's, I mean, one of the reasons I feel it's so important to train people in flow. People come to the Flow Research Collective because they want more productivity, better performance, those sorts of things. And that's great. But what I get in the bargain is increased empathy and an expanded, what we call ecological awareness. Right. But it basically moves sort of Most people are like human, they're self-first and they're very human-centric, right? Flow expands that boundary. You first empathize with other people and then it goes beyond the border of species and it'll go into animals and plants and ecosystems and extends outward. The psychedelics will do the same thing. This is sort of well known. Sometimes some of the meditative states can do it, but not like psychedelics are known for it. Flow's really known for it. That sort of like the self disappearing and then the expanded consciousness that especially transverses like the border of species. That's a, you know, sounds like a very spiritual kind of experience, right? It's got all the hallmarks there. And it's certainly one of the things that shows that these experiences are one of the things that show up in the spiritual traditions and all of most of the wisdom traditions talk about, you know, this sort of thing. So Again, long way of saying maybe, but I tend to agree with you on that.

What is your description of what flow state is?

What's the definition? Scientifically, the definition is useless, but I'll start there. It's an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, flow refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. You get so focused on what you're doing and the task at hand, everything else just starts to disappear. Action and awareness are going to merge. Your sense of self, as we talked about, self-consciousness disappears completely. Voice in your head gets really quiet. The inner critic. Time will pass strangely. Usually it'll speed up. You get so sucked into what you're doing that 2 hours go by and what feels like 2 minutes. Sometimes it can slow down. If you've been in a car crash, into that freeze frame effect, or seen The Matrix bullet time, that'll happen as well in flow sometimes. And throughout all aspects of performance, mental and physical tend to go through the roof. So that's flow in a nutshell.

That place where we feel like we feel our best and we perform our best. Who doesn't want that, right? And we have a $4 trillion altered states economy where a lot of people are seeking that state, that feeling within unconsciously, right? Through drugs, through caffeine, through porn, through video games, through many things that we can kind of alleviate that sense of self and kind of feel more easeful within ourselves that allow that optimal state of consciousness to exist. And so I would love for you just to share your thoughts on how we can so often unconsciously go for things that allow us to get to that state of consciousness, but then how we can consciously trigger flow instead of just unconsciously, uh, seeking unconsciousness in negative ways. Yeah, well, that just don't have as much negative repercussions, right?

One of the things that's interesting about flow, and I've made this argument, other people may disagree. There's again debate here. I think humans, maybe all animals, because a lot of animals can get into flow. All social mammals can get into flow, and maybe all mammals, but definitely with humans, we seem to move in the direction of optimal performance. It's almost as if the system wants to perform that way. I'll give you a simple example. I got to tell you a little about flow states have triggers, right? If you want more flow in your life, these triggers are your toolkit. The most famous one is known as the challenge-skills balance. It's the idea flow follows focus. So that's what all the triggers do. They drive our attention to the present moment. The challenge-skills balance is often called the golden rule of flow. It's the most famous of the triggers, and it's a simple idea. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch but not snap. If I were to explain that emotionally, I would say there's a midpoint between boredom and anxiety that they talk about as the flow channel. Boredom— there's not enough stimulation here. I'm not really paying attention, anxiety. Whoa, way too much. I can't stop paying attention. In between is a flow channel. If you speak physiology at all, it's what's known as the Yerkes-Dobson curve. But all this is sort of besides the point. I want to talk about procrastination. So we are told culturally procrastination is a bad thing. Don't do this. And there's probably some common sense there. But what's interesting about procrastination is it's also a system moving towards optimal performance. So Think about the challenge-skill balance, boredom and anxiety, right? And in between is this flow channel. So procrastination takes one of two forms. Either the thing that you're putting off doing bores you, it's not interesting enough, so you can't, right? What's actually happening is your brain is saying, hey, you can't focus on this thing. You'll never drop into flow and be your best. So put it off until the time stress builds up to the point that you're in that challenge-skill sweet spot, right? And if it's overwhelming, if you're on the other side of the coin, you get the same thing. And so what I always tell people is, if you feel that urge to procrastinate, first figure out, are you procrastinating because the thing bores you or because the thing stresses you out? If it bores you, I'll give you an example from my own life. So I came up as a journalist, and I was poor and had to write hundreds of articles all the time. And most of them I loved. I'm a very curious person, and, you know, I can pretty much find something in any subject that I'm interested in. But every now and again, an article would come up that I was just like, I'm doing this for the money. That's all that's happening here. Um, and I would procrastinate it, right? Like, I'd put it off. And it's a bad idea. You don't want to put off, like, an article that's due for an editor that's writing you a paycheck to the night before. What if my dog gets sick? What if, you know, something happens? So it's a lousy idea. But I had the same— like, I was putting things off. So I started doing— making the challenge harder for myself. I would say, okay, write this article for Wired magazine in the style of Charles Dickens or something like that. Something really absurd where like, yeah, I was curious about how Dickens wrote his sentences, but trying to like sneak a Charles Dickens style article past my Wired magazine editor, that's like, you know, the kind of challenge where you're like, it's goofy, but it was just enough to like, oh, this is kind of goofy. Like I'm writing an article about data caves in this style of like Charles Dickens, and that's just weird enough that it raised the challenge level and I was no longer bored by it and I could get it done. When the task is too hard and too big and too anxious, you just want to chunk it down so what's in front of you is much more manageable. But all this is a long way of saying we do that naturally, right? We procrastinate naturally, and we think it's a bad thing. It's got this cultural bad rap. But if you look at it from the perspective of peak performance, my argument is no, no, it's your system saying, hey, you're capable of much better performance, and let's try to create the situation that will produce that. Part 1. Second answer to your question is about how we relate to dopamine. So all of the, all of the substances and activities you just mentioned, whether we're talking about sex addiction or gambling addiction or shopping addiction or drug addiction or alcohol addiction or internet porn or, you know, take your pick. It's all about that, like dopamine treadmill. Give me more dopamine. Give me more dopamine. Give me more dopamine. We have t-shirts at The Collective that say, never trust the dopamine. Right. And for this very reason. And it's flow. You get a little bit of dopamine, but you get 4 other reward chemicals that are just as potent, just as pleasurable. So you get your whole— there's a lot more going on than just dopamine. Um, that dopamine loop. I don't know if there's any easy way to do it. You just— to me, and this I think is probably, you know, this sort of what I'm about to say in is probably found in all the wisdom traditions. They have different ways of doing this, but you literally just have to sort of break that easy attachment to fast dopamine, which, um, is a I think at some point in everybody's life you have to— you're gonna have to do that. Um, you don't have to do anything, but if you want overall life satisfaction, if you want well-being, if you want peace, um, you're gonna have to break the addiction to easy dopamine. Um, which is not to say flow— I mean, flow is a very addictive state, way more addictive than dopamine, right? If like Do you want to talk on your cell phone? Do you want to go surfing? Most people end up going surfing. Why? Because surfing will drop you into flow and the cell phone will just give you dopamine, right? Like, when you put the rewards side by side, people tend to move towards flow over the, like, the easy, fast dopamine hit. But I think you have to break that, just the stickiness of dopamine. And it's just practice, right? It's like everything else. I'll give you a weird example that happened to me. So they're just now talking about dysfunctional daydreaming. People who have— usually happens in childhood. People with really rough childhoods tend to escape into daydreams, and it becomes dysfunctional because when you come back from the daydream, reality is nowhere near as good as your daydream, right? You're trying to escape reality. So what happens is you end up living in those daydreams. And that was definitely my childhood. And I got to a point Somewhere between middle school and high school, I don't exactly know when it happened, but I started to realize I was like, oh wow, this is actually interfering with— not only does it feel bad when I come to reality, because reality in comparison to my daydream is, you know, um, negative, but it, uh, it was too sticky. It was getting in the way of like I wasn't even paying attention to class, I wasn't even there kind of thing. And I started, I was like, oh, this is a habit. And daydreaming produces a little bit of dopamine, feels good, right? And so I learned sort of early on how, like, I had to just sort of wrestle my brain back from self, um, early on. But it took a while to break that link. And it's, you know, it's like any addiction. It's, it's— you go back and forth a little bit with it, and finally you break free. I don't know if that's the answer. Yeah, we're looking for—

I think it's really interesting because a lot of people definitely struggle with procrastination. I have earlier on for sure. And there's, I think, whether it's from stress or boredom, like you spoke to, those are powerful indicators and inquiries people can have to gain awareness as to why am I putting off what I'm putting off right now? And I feel like the more that we clarify a passion, a purpose in our life that allows us to genuinely go after something that we're excited for in life, then we're not constantly facing this uphill battle of doing things that we're not really excited to do in the first place. So how important do you feel like it is to clarify your passion and purpose if you want to be able to sink more into flow in your life?

So that's a great question. The answer is super important. So the art of the impossible follows the order of our biology, right? It's a peak performance blueprint. But our biology was designed evolutionarily— when I'm talking about it— to work in a specific order. So if you're interested in peak performance, if you're interested in flow, I always talk about the importance of stacking internal or intrinsic motivators, right? There's a difference between external motivators and internal motivators. Extrinsic motivators: money, sex, fame, shit in the world that we'll work hard to get. Internal motivators, there's a lot of them, but there's 5 major ones: curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. And they're literally biologically— one is designed to be built into the other. And the way I sort of break this down for people is curiosity is the simplest motivator in the world. And by the way, When we talk about a motivator, right, one easy way to think about it is one of the biggest things that motivators give us is focus for free. So the brain's an energy hog, right? It uses 25% of our energy, and that's at rest, right? So anytime you're trying to do something like pay attention to something, that's a lot more energy. And, um, anything that gives you focus for free, that's what motivation is great right? So think about curiosity. If you're curious about a subject, you're not working really hard to pay attention to it, right? It happens automatically. So curiosity is the most basic of the intrinsic motivators. It is designed to be built into passion. What that literally means is passion gets really mystified in today's world and, um, ascribed a lot of, a lot of things that, um, maybe it's not. And it's interesting because philosophically, by the way, most people we talk about passion as a really good thing from Plato until Nietzsche. Right. And whether you're talking about the Western philosophical tradition or religious and spiritual traditions, passion is a bad thing. Right. Hume says, oh, wait, we've got this— excuse me, Kant says we have this moral passion, right? What he calls the categorical imperative. He's one of the only philosophers sort of along the way who had some use for passion. But most philosophers were like, no, no, this is bad. This gets us away from kind of rational intellectual thought, which is what we should prize. So it's interesting. It's only been in the past 50, 60, 70 years that we've started to go, oh, no, passion is really important. It's really a good thing, right? Which I just find fascinating. But curiosity, when you can find the intersection of multiple curiosities, right? Not one curiosity. Sometimes that's enough for people to build it into passion. But as a general rule, there's just not enough energy there, right? And it won't hold your attention over the long haul. But if you can— I always start people, make a list of 25 things you're curious about and then look for where they intersect with one another and play at those intersections for a while. This is the other thing that people get wrong with passion. A lot of people are looking for it and purpose is they want it really fast. Passion and purpose are not designed like— that's how you get 2 years into your passion project and go, oh, wow, it was just a phase. This isn't really who I am or what I want to be doing. That's really demotivating. That's an awful place to be. So I always tell people, build passion slowly, right? Build purpose slowly. But passion is built out of multiple curiosities intersecting. Once you have passion, it's a great motivator, as you know, right? Think about romantic love. Think about when you're falling in love, that passion you feel. You can't just stop focusing on the person you're in love with. It happens automatically. Get tremendous amounts of focus for free. The problem of passion over time is— so if you go into passion psychology, they divide passion between harmonious passion and obsessive passion. Obsessive passion goes in a negative direction. Harmonious passion goes in a positive direction. It's difficult to separate the two, right? And I've seen, like, what they would call harmonious passion. I'm writing a book, it's going great, like, and suddenly I get stuck and I get, you know, really obsessive. And it can be kind of a dark spiral for a while, right? So I just say passion in general is a great motivator, but it's a little too selfish for the long haul, right? Which is where purpose comes into play. Now I'm going to give you a bunch of geeky science to why passion and purpose are important. I talked about motivators. Passion is essentially about producing feel-good neurochemistry— norepinephrine and dopamine. That's what you get from passion, is those two chemicals. Purpose is interesting. Those are, by the way, very individual motivators. Once you attach purpose to your passion, you couple your passion to something outside yourself that you'd like to see fixed in the world, right? Something bigger than yourself that will help the planet, help other people, that sort of thing. That's purpose. You get the pro-social neurochemistry, right? Because you've extended it beyond yourself. So you get, you know, dopamine and norepinephrine, which are really powerful motivators. And Like, if you're not familiar with neurochemistry, when I say dopamine and norepinephrine, you put those things together, that's the cocktail called romantic love. So we were talking about it a second ago. We've all fallen in love, that amazing feeling, that's norepinephrine and dopamine. That's what produces that. With purpose, you start to add in serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. These are the pro-social chemicals. So endorphins, um, are opiates, right? They're internal opiates. But that's a mother and a child, or a father and a child, right? That's that parental bond we get with our offspring. Really strong, really we know about oxytocin, and everybody knows about serotonin is like the calming chemical, um, at this point. So you start getting those pro-social chemicals. What does that mean? It means way more motivation, way more focus for free. That's why purpose is such a useful thing from a peak performance perspective. We can circle back and talk about meeting life stuff with purpose and all that stuff if you want, but once you have purpose, what does the system want next? It wants autonomy. The freedom to pursue that purpose, right? It's worthless to have a purpose if you can't actually go after it. And once you have that freedom, once you have autonomy, you want mastery, the skills to pursue that purpose well. We talk about the big 5 motivators, and I talk a lot about stacking motivations. And this is where peak performance— I always say it starts there. And one of the reasons is flow follows focus. And when all 5 of your intrinsic motivators are tightly stacked like that, drives a lot of focus. It also turns out that all 5 of the things that I just mentioned are flow triggers. All of them. Mastery is another way of saying the challenge-skill balance, because flow follows focus. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge is slightly harder than our skill set. So you're always stretching a little outside your comfort zone, getting a little better, getting a little better, getting a little better. That's the path to mastery. Passion produces dopamine, which drives focus. Purpose, dopamine, and a bunch of these other things. Autonomy is interesting. So flow follows focus, and it turns out autonomy is really tightly coupled in the brain to focus. We as humans, we like to drive the—

our bus.

We like to drive the bus, and we pay more attention to where the bus is going when we're the ones driving. Everybody sort of knows this, right? When it's your thing, you care a whole lot more, you pay a whole lot more attention. So autonomy There's a bunch of stuff that's positive about freedom, but it's really about focus from a flow peak performance perspective. But you're getting— curiosity is the same thing. You're getting all 5 of these sort of flow triggers in a stack. And as a sort of precondition, if you want more flow in your life, not a bad place to start, right? The triggers are your toolkit. And this is a really— this is also where your biology wants to start from sort of an evolutionary perspective. Hmm.

I love that. There is so much there in that kind of ladder and how it stacks. I think it's going to be super helpful for people. And it rings true to me that—

let me say, let me add one other thing.

Yeah.

Just because this is the mistake everybody makes on passion and purpose, and it's— I just find it really helpful to know. Sorry to cut you off. So when I say passion to you or to most people, right, you get an image of like, if you're my age, you see Michael Jordan going in for like a windmill dunk. If you're younger, maybe you're Steph Curry shooting a 3. Or LeBron with a windmill dunk. Either way, that's what our image of passion is. Or Yo-Yo Ma playing the cello like that. It's— and that is passion, but it's mature adult passion at the end. That's what it looks like at the end. That's mastery going, right? What people forget is, what does it look like on the front end? What does it look like when you're just starting out, right? We hear everybody saying, I want passion, I want purpose. And they— what they What I hear coming out of their mouth is, what I really want is a lightning bolt from the sky, right? That just something I'm going to— oh, this is my passion. This is my purpose. I've discovered it. One, doesn't work that way. Passion and purpose are earned a little bit of interest at a time. You have to build them up in yourself. One. Two, passion at the front end, it's a little kid in a driveway shooting hoops, trying to get that basketball to fall. It's not— Michael Jordan, LeBron James at the end of the arc. Sure, that's where you're going, but you're actually looking for— so when you think about that bolt of lightning that you want to strike you, let's say it does strike you. What's it going to feel like on the front end? It's going to feel like a little kid with a curiosity, right? Can I get better at this? Can I get better? That's what it feels like on the front end. So people get it wrong. They don't have enough patience with themselves. And you really need that. But they get it wrong because they're expecting this big, weighty, kind of heavy, mystical, thick thing that feels spiritual. Oh my God, I know what my passion is. I know what my purpose is. It's not what it's like on the front end at all. I've never met— I've talked about passion and purpose with tens of thousands of people at this point. I've never heard one story where it's you know, all-consuming. It shows up fully formed on the front. It just doesn't work that way. That's not really how our biology works. Now, let me give you the caveat, because we do have love at first fight, right? Maybe we don't have love at first sight, but I've certainly met a bunch of people who have, you know, had that experience. I probably had it once or twice over the course of my life as well. That's instant passion. So it seems like romantically, maybe Maybe that's possible a little bit, even though we all know, like anybody who's been in a relationship, but I don't care how passionate you are at the front end, you're still going to have to earn that passion over time and work at it, right? So it may come with that crazy feeling. I mean, it's still going to require a massive amount of effort. This is the other thing that people get wrong about passion is they think it means easy, right? Oh, I've got my passion, I've got my purpose. No, these are burdens. Purpose especially. So my purpose, one of my— has always been to make the world a better place for animals, right? This is— my wife and I run a dog sanctuary. I've been involved in environmental and animal rights issues for 30 years at this point. That's a purpose. Do you know what that is like in the real world? Have I gotten anywhere? Right? Have I— have I done anything? I mean, I've worked ceaselessly. I'll give you an example. We run a hospice care dog sanctuary. In 20 years, about 800 animals have been through our facility. So we've taken care of 800 animals.

It's amazing.

They kill— they meaning the US government euthanizes 10 to 20 million dogs a year in America. Okay. Mostly 50% of those animals for the crime of getting older. Right. Dogs get old, they lose control of their bladders and the balls, and they get dumped into shelters. And for most animals, it's a death sentence. You know, there are very few facilities like ours that do this work. But if you think about it, we, for 20 years, my wife and I, I can count on my hands, maybe I now need my toes too, the number of times we've been out to dinner in 20 years. We've taken one trip together away from the dogs and so forth. So there's been some sacrifice to do this. The truth of the matter is I've worked on this for 20 years. And there's a bunch of other environmental initiatives. This is the most successful one. They kill— let's say it's 10 million dogs a year. We didn't even dent Tuesday. I didn't even dent Tuesday. Right. Forget about— that purpose is about never reaching your goal. Right. If you've got a real purpose, I want to do this in the world, I mean, you're never fulfilled. You never get there. It's an endless, heartbreaking treadmill. So everybody talks about, I want passion, I want purpose. Are you sure? Are you sure? Because purpose is heavy and it's a burden as much as a blessing. So I hear this from people. And what I really think every time somebody says, oh, I want passion and purpose, is no, I want to get laid on a Friday night. That's what I hear. That's what I hear you saying to me. I want to do something that's going to make me look good for whoever it is that I'm attracted to. That's what I'm hearing. Because when I actually— like, when you actually see what passion and purpose looks like up close, when it's real, it's heavy. It weighs a lot. It's not— it's not what people think it is. I'm not dissuading anybody. Like, it makes certain things a lot easier. It makes a lot of things a lot harder.

Yeah. It's the burden you're willing to pay for what you feel like needs to come through you and what needs to be done.

Exactly.

And you're happy to make those sacrifices because the alternative is even more painful, right? Not doing that.

The alternative is more pain. I don't know if you're happy, but you're not bitter. They don't make you— right, you don't, you don't resent the sacrifice. They're not always pleasing, but you don't tend to resent it afterwards, right?

And when I look at my own life and I look at the overlap of my curiosities that have come into this, into the show, my, my, you know, my passion, my curiosities for videography, for filmmaking, for sharing media as medicine, and, you know, reaching out and being able to share conversations that can raise consciousness on the planet. My deep curiosities and passions for having these kind of conversations and the format of like all these things overlap, right? And they stick, they kind of stack on top of each other like you're speaking to, to finding that harmonious passion that can, as you continue to go on that path, then develops into mastery one day in your life. And I think that's so beautiful. You've shared a quote of yours is that if we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way around. And so I'd love for you to share how, um, our purpose can— and if we want to become the best version of ourselves and impact and be the most effective version of ourselves, then we need to find that place where it's like that most ease and, um, where it can actually feel like play. Because we're only going to get masterful at something if we really love to do it in the first place.

So let's start with the geeky neuroscience. For one second, because there's— so this is one of the things that people don't understand about learning. Quick shorthand for how—

what—

so flow massively amplifies learning and memory, right? It's one of the things that happens in flow. The Department of Defense did a study of soldiers in flow, and they found they learned 240 to 500% faster than normal. So flow is known to massively shorten the path to mastery. Um, normally when we learn What happens is the brain— you get a little bit of norepinephrine. Norepinephrine is like, I'm awake, I'm alert, I'm a little excited, I'm a little curious, right? That's what's going on on the inside. Um, maybe if, uh, there's a goal tied into what you're learning, what you're doing, you'll get a little dopamine. So two neurochemicals boost learning. Great, super useful. When we play, you get norepinephrine, dopamine, and endorphins. Right. Really big hit of endorphins as a general rule. So one, massively amplifies learning, shortens the path to mastery. A to B. It's not quite flow. Flow's a bigger neurochemical dump, but it's much better than regular learning. So one, if you're walking a path to mastery and you want to get there quickly, play's a faster road. Also, because when we're playing— so this is really important. As a— I'm a writer, I'm a creative, I— and there's a time I want to be self-conscious and critical of my work, right? But that's not when I'm actually getting the words down on the text. That's what editing is for, right? When I'm getting the words on the text, I don't want shame, self-consciousness, embarrassment, etc., etc., etc. That's all the stuff we tend to get from learning. Oh, I'm trying to get this, I'm trying to get this, and I'm not, I'm not getting any better, right? And beat ourselves up inside. And if you're wired like me, I really beat myself up inside for, for not learning. I'm really hard on myself on the inside. So play has been a lifesaver for me because it takes all that crap out of the way for when I need it out of the way. So I always, with my writing, I, you know, I— even if I go in and like, I work, I write every day, right? It's a work thing. I show up at 4:00 in the morning, and no matter what else is going on, I'm going to write at least till 8:00 AM. And that's going to happen every day, um, unless I'm on the road when I read. But like, you know, it's essentially 300 days a year, and it has been for 40 years or something like that. Um, that's a discipline, that's, that's a work effort. But 10 minutes in, I'm playing, right? It starts out, it's the same thing. I got to get my butt in the chair, I got to get into— but the minute I'm going, and the minute I start getting noodled with language, I'm playing. And And one of the reasons that quote is so important, you've got to turn work into play, right, to get to wherever you want to go, is because the road is long. The road is just really, really, really long. And one of the things that peak performers know, and this is in our country, the new book, I really talk a lot about this. This is something a lot of people sort of get wrong, probably for really good reasons. For peak performers is a last resort. Most people, grit is the first tool. Something gets hard. Fuck you. I can just tough this out.

I got this.

I'm more focused. Right. And that's fine, except it's a recipe for burnout. Right. So peak performers will reach for every other motivation possible before going for grit. So we just talked about the big 5 intrinsic motivators, right? That's the first place I turn. So if the task is really grueling, sure, I can just get gritty, or I could stop and go, what about this is really curious to me? Where's my curiosity in here? What's really cool in here that I'm super interested in? How does this task tie in with my passion and my purpose? I can reframe it that way. Or challenge skills balance is something I love to do. Rather than get gritty, can I detune the challenge level? Level a little bit, right? Chunk it down so what's in front of me is smaller or more playful kind of thing, and start there and then build back up. So grit is the tool you— I mean, we're all going to need it, right? And I always say that, like, in any given day, first of all, grit's also limited, right? It's tied to willpower on a daily basis, and willpower drains over the course of the day. So you have a lot of it in the morning, high energy, and then it fades as we get towards the end of the day, which is why, like, you can quit smoking or stay on your diet all day long, and then you get to like 8 o'clock at night and suddenly you're powering through ice cream, right? Because willpower has— you've used it up and, you know, and you have none left sort of at the end of the day. Um, so grit's a limited resource, first of all. And we all know if you're getting after it in any real way, there's going to be shit that happens every day that you're going to have to be gritty about no matter what, right? Just because it— file under shit happens, cat. Story. So if stuff's going to happen and you're going to have to be gritty anyways, if that's the only tool— like, why are so many people burned out? It's because this is the tool they keep reaching for, and there's a lot of other tools in that kit that you want to go to first.

This is great. I can tell that we're in flowing conversation now because it's actually where I was going to take you next. And it's actually a good sign for this podcast and something I want to maybe pin and bring up later about flow and group dynamics. Okay. But, you know, if we're always chasing flow, it doesn't necessarily make space for the part of ourselves that when we learn anything new, we're going to face those inevitable hard, challenging moments when we're, you know, when we're learning something new. And so I think I've shared on this podcast before, and I love kind of those 4 stages of learning I'm sure you're familiar with where you start and you're unconsciously incompetent. You just don't know what you don't know in regards to tying your shoelace, learning how to ski. You don't even know the thing exists, right? And then you have conscious incompetency where you know you don't know, and then you have conscious competency where it takes a lot of energy and effort to do the thing. You have to think a lot about it. You have to learn how to do the two loops and the pull for tying your shoelaces or whatever it is. Pizza and French fries.

Pizza and French fries. Whatever. Skiing.

And then we get to that place of unconscious competency where it just becomes second nature. And that's super in flow, right?

Right.

What I want to focus on is that area of conscious competency where you're learning the thing and that often feels like a lot of resistance. It's challenging to learn something new, learn to scale on the piano. It takes a lot of effort. We all desire that state of flow where we're just masterful and we're doing the thing. But inevitably, to get there, you have to focus and get to that point where you're— it's a little bit more clunky. And so how do you relate to that? Because a lot of, I think, people, when they speak about flow, it's this ideal state of just, you know, so much ease. But if we're going to learn anything new, which is part of the process of becoming self-actualized, it's going to consist of a lot of those consciously competent moments.

So, because there's like 17 answers here, let, let me, let me start with, uh, the first thing that pops into my mind, because you asked a flow-specific question. So if you read my books, you know this: flow states are not binaries. You're not in the zone or out of the zone, right? There, it's actually a four-stage cycle, and you have to move through all four stages of the, of the flow cycle before you can pop back into flow, right? So there's no such thing as a permanent flow state, which is why we— one, we know per-flow is not enlightenment. But like, I always tell people, in the early days of my career, it stopped happening, but people would come up to me about once a month. It was usually a guy, eyes really, really big. Oh dude, you gotta study me, I'm in flow all the time. And it used to happen a lot, and I never knew what to say to people. And finally I just settled on the truth, which is, you know, we have a word for We call that schizophrenia, right? Mania sometimes. But that's what that is. There's no such thing as a permanent flow state. And some of the stages of the flow cycle are really unflowy. And flow starts with a struggle phase.

Why?

Because you have to learn things consciously before you can perform them unconsciously. And it's always struggle. So there's always a struggle phase. Unless I'm on the front end of a flow state one way or another. In fact, even in miniature. So we just worked on— spent the past 3 years working on a big paper that came out a couple of months ago on what happens in the brain in the first few seconds of flow as we transition into flow. And one of the things that is becoming more and more clear is you may need to trigger the fight response for a second. Like we've heard about fight or flight, the fight response at the front end of a flow state. So a lot of people cure flow and are like, oh, it's gonna, like, I want a flowy mountain bike ride, right? Going out for a flowy mountain bike ride is the easiest way to go to the hospital, right? You'll get bounced off your bike. Why? Because mountain biking is a violent, aggressive sport, and you have to go out and attack the mountain. And it's through that attacking that you'll actually get into flow. You can't go out seeking flow in that way because you're not bringing enough to the fight. You literally, you need the fight response because it takes— tells the brain to put all your focus right here, right now. That's really what it's doing, right? Then you want— you want the testosterone underneath it, right? You don't want to fight anything. You just want the testosterone for focus. Um, so even in miniature, there's going to be struggle, right? It's built in. That's the first thing I want to say. So if you think that a lifespan in flow is a life without struggle, disavow yourself of that notion, right? It's literally baked in. To this state. The other side of it is most of the time.

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 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 you. All the best.

This is possibly not true with learning some action sports or some combat sports, uh, where there are penalties for failure. Like, physical pain can be a penalty for failure. Getting punched in the face. But right, getting punched in the face And even this isn't entirely true. Struggle is awful. Learning is awful, mostly because of how we're talking to ourselves, right? I've been teaching myself how to draw. I have a degree in art from way back, but I haven't touched drawing in 30 years. And I just came back to it 7 months ago. And all I'm doing is making a drawing a day, basically. And usually it's just like, today I'll draw shoulders, today I'll draw trees, today— and then once a week I'll try to make art. And I'm certainly not good enough to be— I'm not making art yet, right? I'm doing— but like, I let 7 months of doing this, 250 drawings, let's say, there might be 3 that I might actually show to people. Maybe, maybe, just maybe. And only if I really love you. I've posted a couple on social media. Why? What? Because I want to— like, I don't like learning anything in public. It really bothers me. I don't like being bad in public. I don't mind being bad, but I don't like being bad in public. But I want to get over that because it blocks learning. So I'm forcing myself to put some of these drawings out on social media along the way. Um, just because it helps me break down that. But as a general rule, the experience has been remarkably flowy. And one of the reasons is I have zero expectation. I have no— I don't think I'll ever do anything professionally with those drawings. I have no plans for an art show or a graphic novel or any, any of that stuff. This is, this is really just for me. Um, but I don't judge it, right? I, in fact, Most— if it's good, I'm more surprised than if it's bad. If it's bad, I'm just— I'm still learning, right? Usually what is a win for me is it's bad, but I can see what I did wrong so I don't have to make that mistake again, right? And that's how I'm looking at it. I'm calling that a win. If you're going at it that way, the learning process can be incredibly flowy. Now, I'm not dropping into deep— what we'd call macro flow, deep macroscopic flow states. Um, but I am getting into microflow, the kind of low-grade version of the state, almost every time I draw. And it's literally just the— I'm showing up, I'm putting in the work, and I'm not judging at all. Now, that's unusual for me. It took me a long time to figure out how to not judge myself, right? I'm harsh on myself, and I like that about myself. I think one of the reasons I've I'm successful is because I'm a ruthless taskmaster on myself. But it's gotten to a point where like it can, it can stand in my way and some of it's negative. So I'm trying, especially with drawing, to kind of remove that. And posting things in public is, is taking that a little farther and making it a little more uncomfortable. But it's working. So you— my point is you can— microflow is very available, right, um, along the way. When it starts getting blocked for a lot of people is the shame, the self-consciousness. Or for me, I say this a lot with skiing, self-expectation has ruined more ski days than anything else in the world. Right. And flow's the worst for this. So this is really funny, but we talk about flow as the most pleasurable state on earth, and it is. But I get into a great flow state, I go skiing and say, like, I, you know, I learned a bunch of new tricks in the terrain park. In flow, the next time I come back, I expect to be able to perform at that level right again. And that's usually not how it works. What happens with flow, especially with athletics, but usually in general, when you can do a deep flow state, it's your body showing you, okay, this is what might be possible at the unconscious level, but you're still going to have to learn how to do all these things consciously along the way before you can get back here. So I feel like sometimes flow states give you a preview of what's possible without flow. And I always say, for example, with skiing, my favorite day, though it's a miserable day physically, my favorite days are the days that I do everything I did previously in flow out of flow, right? Because it's proof that I've actually mastered these skills. It's usually— they say in sports, they say you can win a championship without flow. If it's a one-game— you can't win a 7-game series without flow. It's not— that, that'll never happen. But if it's a single one-game, a Super Bowl for example, um, you can probably pull that off without flow, but you'll never want to do it again because it's so miserable.

Yeah.

So you can perform at your best without the sport, without flow, but it's rare. I love those days even though they are miserable.

It's because it's become a part of you.

It's become a part of you, and now you, like, you can execute it when you're tired, when you're not at like That's what— that, that I'm really excited because then I'm like, oh, I got this and I can trust that the skill is built in.

That's exciting. I think I love that analogy or your story of drawing and how you share that, because there's that quote that what we do in the dark shines in the light. We're constantly being fed people's highlight reels of, of their unconscious competency of what they're doing. That's like, that's taken them a long time oftentimes to get to that point. And we don't see the dark times. We don't see them consciously practicing.

By the way, I should tell you, my best friend started doing— he was teaching himself guitar and he started doing it. And I was like, oh wow, that's really brave. Yeah, I don't know if I could do that, you know what I mean? So I watched somebody else do it first. I was like, okay, that's a really good idea. And I'm really a fan of it because for the same reason you pointed out, like, it bugs me on social media where you get like the best lives and, and nothing else. And I also think I'm not a fan of social media. I tend to think social media broke the world. But, but so immediate feedback is a flow trigger. And what flow follows focus. When feedback is immediate, we don't have to wonder how we perform. We know, right? So one reason sports are so flowy is you either serve the tennis ball into the net or you got it into the court, right? In or out. You know, that's immediate feedback. The internet, social media can be really great for a little bit of immediate feedback. I don't think it's useful for any other— I mean, there are some good ways to do business on social media that I think are probably useful, but for creativity and immediate feedback, I think it's a great tool for that and really, really useful. But I watched a friend of mine do it and I was like, oh my God, if he was willing to be like really bad because like A bad drawing is one thing. Listening to somebody learning how to play guitar is kind of brutal, right? Like it's maybe a little worse. And he was so brave with it. And I was watching and I was like, oh, I've got the same, like I got the same shame and embarrassment and I only like to be great in public too.

Right.

So let me go right at this. Let me try this too. So thank you for giving credit for it, but I stole it from somebody. It's not mine.

No, it's good. It's important for those reminders. Is in a world where everyone's just showing the best version of themselves. Can you, before we move on, can you just give those definitions of micro versus macro flow?

Yes.

Actually define what those 4 stages are just to clarify that as well.

Flow is a spectrum. It's not a singular experience. It's a spectrum of experiences. I always say it's like emotions. Anger. You're a little irked. You're homicidally murderous. Right. Same emotion. Anger. Flow shows up on a spectrum, microflow to macroflow. So let me back up a little bit. Flow has— how do you know if you're in flow or out of flow? How do you know if your friend's in flow? The state has 6 core— we call them phenomenological characteristics, meaning this is how the experience makes you feel, right? Complete concentration on the task at hand, a merger of action and awareness. I mentioned some of these earlier— the vanishing of self, time dilation, We don't feel peak performance. That's not our internal experience. I could be looking at you in flow, right? And I see you performing at your best. Inside, it feels like a sense of control. I can control things I can't normally control. My words are doing amazing things at 4:00 AM on a Tuesday, and that doesn't normally happen, right? Like, wow, I got all this control of my sentence. Or I keep shooting baskets and the hoop is as big as a hula hoop and I can't miss, right? And finally, the experience is autotelic, meaning it ends in itself, meaning it's so pleasurable.

Autotelic?

Autotelic is is a Greek term for an end in itself, and it tries to describe the fact that flow is so joyous, so addictive, so pleasurable, so much of our best feeling on earth, that once an activity starts producing flow, we automatically go back to that activity. We're just obsessed with it. It doesn't take effort to go do it. We just want to keep doing it, right? Um, that's autotelic. So when we measure micro to macro flow, Microflow is those 6 conditions showed up, but they're like 1 or 2. They're turned on the volume knob. It's like 1 or 2. So you go to work, you sit down to write an email to your boss, and you get so— it's supposed to take 2 minutes. You get so sucked into what you have to say that like 45 minutes goes by. You've written an essay instead of a paragraph. And maybe so the entire voice in your head, self-consciousness, didn't totally fade away, but bodily awareness did. And when you sort of wake back up, you realize you have to run to the bathroom. Bathroom, right? This happens to all of us all the time. This is like a daily experience. So microflow is actually really common. In fact, Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow psychology— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi— uh, in a study dating, I want to say, back into the '80s, 1980s, so 40 years ago at this point, found that people spend about 5% of their work life— 5 to 10% of their work life— in microflow, often without even noticing it. So microflow is really common. It's the low-grade version of it. The other side, macro flow, it's when all those things are turned up to 11. And until the 1950s, macro flow wasn't a thing. We talked about that as a spiritual experience, religious experiences or spiritual experiences or mystical experiences. And it was Abraham Maslow was studying commonalities among successful people, and he found that all the successful people he was studying all used flow to alter their consciousness, perform at their best. But everybody in this particular study group was an atheist. So it was the first time somebody went, oh, this isn't just reserved for religious people or spiritual people. This is available for everybody. That was actually where Chick Set Me High came from. So Maslow figured out— pre-Maslow, it's a spiritual experience. Maslow was like, oh no, super successful people have this. Chick Set Me High comes along a decade later and says, what about everybody else? What about like the common man and woman? What do they feel when they explore, when they experience optimal performance? And that was his quest. That was what he started out trying to figure out is, is it the same? Is it different? It's obviously the same. But so macro flow is really powerful. And some of the weirder out-of-body experiences, cosmic unity, that feeling of oneness with everything, these are common experiences in macro flow. We understand the neurobiology. Behind them. By the way, since you have a slightly more spiritual audience, let me just say this out loud. Just because there's science at the heart of something does not say anything about the greater why question, right? I learned this years ago from my mentor, Andrew Newberg, who started out doing research on Franciscan nuns and Tibetan Buddhists who felt cosmic unity, oneness with everything, and he wanted to know where it came from. This was, this was really early work for me in flow. But he taught me, one, my field in general, in altered states in general, the field of studying that has tremendous advancement between when scientists sit down with spiritual folks and have conversations and try to figure out what the hell, where the commonality is and what's going on. That's where most of the progress has come from in the past 30 years. And a lot of the fields that you're interested in, the conversations we're having, it was these conversations. And I always just want to tell people, I am an agnostic. I have no idea. And one way or the other, and I like the mystery, I like not knowing. I'm really comfortable with that. I like the uncertainty. A lot of people don't. One way or another, just because I'm talking about biology, it doesn't answer any of the why questions. Just talking about how. Yeah, I had to say that. Sorry.

No, it's good.

Macro flow. Microflow, macroflow is the mystical experience. Microflow, um, one of the things that's really important for anybody interested in peak performance, one of the things that you learn how to do is macroflow is really common. How do you turn up the volume on a macroflow state to get it to— or a microflow state to get it to a macroflow state? That's one of the things that we've started to learn how to do. The second thing you asked about is I said flow is a 4-stage cycle. On the front end is this struggle phase. It's a loading phase. And this is really good because you, you broke down the, the, you know, consciousness, the associated unconscious, uh, learning. Struggle is about using your conscious mind to really think hard about, about it. And it's usually a loading phase where you're loading, then overloading the brain with information. That is followed by a real— what's called a release phase. You literally have to take your mind off the problem. So what you want to do is pass the problem over from the conscious mind to the subconscious mind to solve it, right? And you can only do that by taking your mind off the problem. So that's what happens in the release phase. And usually there's— usually activities that are really good for that, low-grade physical activity that doesn't exhaust you, but like a long walk walk is a, is a really famous way, uh, for people to go through a release phase. Gardening, um, building model airplanes actually, and model dinosaurs, like building models. There's research that shows this is a phenomenal release activity. Drawing is a good, good activity there. Um, TV doesn't work. TV will actually block— the next stage is flow, and it'll end up blocking flow because of how it affects your brain waves. But you get the idea. Third stage is flow itself, and flow is a high-energy state, takes a lot of energy to produce. So on the back end of a flow state, there's a recovery phase, and the recovery phase is important for a couple reasons. One, you have to— if you got into flow, you need that recovery phase if you actually want to learn what you learned in flow, right? We need deep delta wave sleep to pass things into long-term memory. So really important on the back end of a flow state, you could get this massively amplified learning. So you've taken it all in, but it's not locked yet. It's not locked into long-term storage. And if you don't sleep 7-8 hours the night after a really powerful flow state, you just sort of wasted that flow state. You might have had fun, but you— it hasn't helped performance in the long run and hasn't helped learning in the long run, that sort So that's the 4 stages of the flow cycle, and that's the spectrum of flow.

What I would like to touch on next is some kind of like practical, useful things. I mean, we touched on many, but in regards to individuals that want to set up their environment to help it be conducive to flow, I would love for you to like, what are some common triggers, things that are extremely helpful for things to alter within their environment, within their workspace, within their home that can allow them to go through those 4 stages more easily?

Flow follows focus. Can only show up when all of our attention is right here, right now. I said that's what all the flow triggers do. The first and most important flow trigger is complete concentration, right? So when it comes to— and let's talk about individual flow, not group flow, the shared collective version. Let's just stay with individual flow for a second. This means, first of all, you have to practice distraction management. Like before you move into your workspace, you got to turn off your email, turn off your smartphone messages, notifications, to have conversations with your— you know, if you're working from home, talk to your partner, talk to your spouse, talk to your kids, talk to your roommates. If you're in an office, talk to your boss, talk to your coworkers. Right. I always tell people that Distractions are terrible for flow. In fact, there's, uh, there was work done, uh, the guy, uh, Timothy Lister, and I can't remember whose partner was, uh, they wrote PeopleSoft. Old school coders from the back, from the '90s and the early 2000s did a lot of work on flow. They were working on flow and coders, and they, they found that if coders get knocked out of flow, it'll take them a minimum of 15 minutes to get back in, if they can even get back in at all. So those distractions are really costly. They're going to block, keep you out of flow. And even if you do get into flow, they can knock you back out. And there's big costs there. So one, you want to just remove all the distractions. This also tells us, um, one thing across the boards: open office plans are a disaster. They're just a disaster. Um, because even in group flow, the shared collective version of flow, the The first thing you need to do is you want to wall the group off from the rest of the world. So you don't need individual concentration, you need group concentration. And so that's distraction management is one of the best places to start there. I have found not always the case. Novelty is a flow bigger. And I like a space that if I got a view of beautiful nature, it's really useful. It may not be everybody, but you get a lot of novelty in there. So I can look up and catch little bits of, oh, wow, a hawk just flew through that. That novelty, a little bit of dopamine, tiny little, which is driving focus. Useful. So that's one thing I often think about. Beyond that is interesting because it doesn't seem like there's a formula that works across the board for everybody. People are very, very, very individual. I think it's more about how you manicure your internal state, but there are So let's talk about the simplest things people can do if they want more flow in their life. From a practical standpoint, it's remarkably obvious, but it's very true. So we all have what we call a primary flow activity, which is essentially— it's that thing you've done since you were a little kid that most of the time just drops you into flow, right? We can say it really technically that this is the thing that has the flow triggers that you are most susceptible for, blah, blah, blah. But it's really whatever you've done your whole life that is most likely to drop you into flow. For me, it's skiing. My wife, it's hiking our dogs to the backcountry. My best friend is playing the guitar, as we talked about a second ago. On and on. Some people, it's dancing samba. Some people, it's playing with their kids. Some people, the list goes on. But flow is essentially a focusing deal. So one of the things that we know is the more flow you get, the more flow you get. So I go skiing on Saturday, ski all day, get into a flow state, means I'm gonna have an easier time getting into flow on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday.

It's more flow.

Flow begets more flow. It's a focusing skill. It's like mindfulness, right? The more you meditate, the better you get at meditation, right? Yeah, exactly. So the same thing is happening with flow. So that's A, B, two other things that are really critical here. When we drop into flow, we experience massively heightened happiness, well-being, and creativity. Creativity in some studies spikes 400% to 700% above baseline. Nobody's really tried to measure the actual impact on happiness and well-being other than to say that we know the happiest people on Earth are the people with the most flow in their lives. The people who score off the charts for overall life satisfaction and well-being are the people with the most flow in their So intimately tied with that stuff. But the heightened creativity and the heightened productivity and that heightened happiness will outlast a flow state by a day, maybe two. So that's cool too. Also, as we move into flow, it tends to reset our nervous system. So flow will push all the stress hormones out of our system. So just from a general performance standpoint, you're resetting your nervous system. Anxiety blocks flow, but it it blocks learning, it blocks all kinds of performance. So there's a lot of benefits psychologically, emotionally, and performance-wise from doubling down on your primary flow activity. And this is the very thing as we get older, what do we do? We set down childish things, right? The surfboard goes away, the skateboard goes away. No, no, I've got responsibilities now. I've got a— and it's literally the worst thing we can possibly do. In fact, burnout, which is so prevalent today, over and over and over again. We know that the— if you're burned out, the single best thing you can do to restore yourself to, you know, normal is double down on your primary flow activity. What the research shows is like, you don't need a ton of time. 3 to 4 hours a week is often enough to, to do the job. And you can usually, if you want, you can split that up into a couple of sessions. But it's literally like one afternoon a week you should probably devote to something that's really flowy for yourself. For this reason. That's not a way of manicuring your space and your environment, but it's a way of manicuring your life.

Yeah.

For— to maximize flow.

That's important. I mean, it's a, it's a combination of the things we don't do and the things we do do, right? So the things we don't do— putting technology, the phone, in a different room when we're trying to write a book, right? Or like the things that we just eliminate those distractions like you spoke to. And then the things that we can do internally— manicuring— but then also externally in our environment, whether you know, whatever it is for people— essential oils or a view or like things that can really help you just kind of sink into what— into presence.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's exactly right.

So you gave that one. Is there any other quick practical ones outside of just doing some other things that bring you into flow, but quick practical things? Is there anything else that has really worked for you before I hop into the next thing?

All the flow triggers are super effective. Of, uh, so let me give you just another practical tip. For me, I have to read a lot of neuroscience textbooks. Um, as you can imagine, they're fascinating. They're thrillers, really, just page-turners. Um, and, uh, so, and that naturally, like, I want to read in flow because learning is significantly amplified and pattern recognition is significantly amplified. So when I have to read about— I save them up until I have like 2 2 or 3 textbooks to read, and I will go— I usually get a hotel room with a view for the same novelty reason. Like, I find a hotel room somewhere, get a balcony, and I'll sit on that balcony and, um, purposefully read there for novelty, right? Novelty is a flow trigger. This is— this, you know, if I— if that's not available to me, I'll drive across town and go to a coffee shop I've never been in, right? Just that little bit of extra novelty is going to amplify focus and help drive you towards flow. And so that's another just like really simple, easy sort of practical tip. I always say that if you're interested in more flow in your life, the place you have to sort of start is what I like to talk about is the positive psychology basics. So positive psychology spent about 30 years sort of trying to figure out what do we need to do to get into flow. And they weren't talking about flow itself, like creating the flow state. They were just like, to perform at your best, what are the basics? And there's sort of 4 things that have come out of that, uh, that are really important. One, you need regular sleep, 7-8 hours of sleep a night. Flow is a very high-energy state. Sure, you can get into flow, you know, You can get lucky, stay up all night and drop into flow. It'll happen certainly, but it's not reliable, repeatable, sustainable over a long haul. It's a bad peak performance strategy. So it's general 7-8 hours of sleep a night for all of us if you want to maximize flow, hydration, nutrition, right? There's no secret, there's no one, and there's definitely no flow diet at all. But hydration, nutrition, right? We— it's a high energy state. This is kind of a no-brainer. The one that's tricky here on this is I'm talking about ways to produce physical energy, right? Like to get into a flow state, social support. And people hear about social support as like a psychological safety thing and a mental health concern, which it is. But what's really interesting is that whenever we face a situation, right, could be an opportunity, right, or a challenge I want to rise towards, or it could be a threat that I want to run away from. From, and we have to evaluate it. And this happens all day long to all of us. So when we're in that situation, the brain, when it evaluates, one of the things it asks is, do you have people around you who love you, who have your back? Because if you got folks around who love you, who got your back, and you have a support system, coworkers who, you know, that sort of thing, well, if you fuck up and fail, they can pick you up again, and you're much more willing to take the chance. And then that this thing, the situation is an opportunity, and you won't get a huge stress response. A huge stress response takes a tremendous amount of energy, it burns a ton of energy, so it will end up blocking flow. Instead, you'll get a much more sympathetic response. And, um, obviously if you don't have that social support network and, and, and you keep getting these huge stress responses, you're not going to have the energy left for flow. So we And you don't need tons of friends, tons of family. You need a couple of relationships that you sort of regularly check in with. I'm an extreme introvert. I don't need a whole lot of contact. People that are really extroverted might need more, but you got to sort of figure out what you want and you want to get it on a daily basis. The other 3 things, the other things you want to think about is anxiety blocks flow. We talked about that challenge, skills, balance, right? And obviously too much anxiety is just going to push you out of that sweet spot. And because, you know, you gotta like push on your skills anyways, right? So there's going to be a little anxiety in this anyways. You're going to have a little bit of norepinephrine in your system anyways. So people who are really good at flow and really good at dropping into flow before you even get to what you can do to get into flow will make sure they're manicuring their nervous system, right? And there's three— the three best ways There are a couple others, but the 3 best ways to sort of, you know, calm yourself down: daily gratitude practice, daily mindfulness practice, or regular exercise. Right. And gratitude practice takes 5 minutes. Mindfulness for stress reduction, right? It's 11 minutes. Exercise for stress reduction. You want to exercise until it gets quiet upstairs and your lungs open up, which is a signal that the brain has released nitric oxide. Same thing happens in float. Pushes stress hormones out of your system. I tell people, normal conditions, do one a day, right? And if you're pressed for time, do a gratitude list. It also has the extra bonus. We did some work with Glenn Fox. He's at USC. He's one of the world's leading gratitude experts. He's a neuroscientist. We found that a regular gratitude practice also makes you flow prone. So you want to increase the amount of flow in your life. Gratitude is one easy way to get there. But if there's a lot going on, do 2 a day, right? At the Flow Research Collective during COVID we asked our employees, the folks working with us, to do 3 a day. We're a peak performance organization. We want our people performing at their best. Everybody's freaked out during COVID and super stressed, and they were turning to us for help. So I couldn't have freaked out people, right? So I was like, all right, you want to work here? Gratitude practice, mindfulness, regular exercise, because every day, no matter what, otherwise, like, you can't, you can't do this job right now. So those are all sort of the basics, right? And, and that's where I start. And then you want to start playing with the flow triggers, right? And, um, I always tell people, start with distraction management, right? Start also, uh, complete concentration. One of the things people always want to know is, well, how long should I focus for, right, if I can? And I always say you want to start by starting, right? You want to sort of like wall off your focus flow time from the world. But if in the beginning you can only get 10 minutes, 20 minutes, we'll start there, right? Um, flow massively amplifies productivity, so you're going to get time back, right? You end up getting time back for this. But what you really would like to be able to do is 90 to 120 minutes. The reason is the brain has a built-in focus for 90 to 120 minutes long. How do we know this? We also have a dreaming slot, a sleep cycle. It's 90 to 120 minutes long. We have a sleep cycle, we have a waking cycle. It's the exact opposite. We all know about the sleep side. We're less aware of the waking side. But the brain is designed to focus for like 90 to 110 minutes at a time and can do it really, really well. So what happens is, as you start working towards that, um, you'll find it gets easier. Right? Because you're actually just taking advantage of your natural biology that way. So I was talking— when you start with complete concentration, that's where I start. Distraction management. See if you can get 90 to 120 minutes. The next thing that is really helpful here is task focus, not ego focus. So one of the things that happens in flow neurobiologically is our prefrontal cortex deactivates. Your ego lives in your prefrontal cortex. So if I'm writing and I'm thinking about like how my audience is going to feel about my words, right, are they going to like them, are they going to not— that's an extrinsic motivator, that's an outside thing, and it fires up my prefrontal cortex and gets my ego involved, right? You want to stay task-focused, not ego-focused.

The last thing that I want to dive into today is, as I mentioned earlier, I'm so fascinated in how group flow unfolds and how when you bring— and I sometimes do these mastermind dinners, I bring together 8 people who just like a Jeffersonian type style type dinner or on a specific topic of life. And I always find that there's just another level of intelligence that opens up when the group of individuals come kind of sync and flow in conversation that isn't available maybe just as an individual. There's a new energy that becomes available. And so I'm I'm just curious your thoughts on, on what becomes possible when multiple consciousnesses come together into flow.

So this is what group flow is so great for— it maximizes choice and creativity. So an individual in flow has what I like to talk about as 360-degree creativity, meaning you're performing at your best So any direction you go in, right, you're going to be great at. But a group together where everybody has 360 degrees, what you can produce together is so much more powerful than what you can produce alone. This is, by the way, the reason Group Flow is everybody's favorite experience on Earth, is this very thing we're talking about. If there's the most freedom, we literally have the most freedom inside a group flow because you've got everybody performing at your best. So obviously a team is more powerful than an individual, and a team performing at the best where everybody is in flow, you can go in a ton of directions and get a ton of stuff done. So that's sort of the medium answer in between. Um, we can talk about why it happens neurobiologically and all that stuff and where it comes from. Um, It's true, it's truly, you know, rare and wonderful. And it certainly, it massively amplifies learning. And there's certain, like, learning to park ski— we talk about this a lot— where like anything physically dangerous, where like, or difficult, where there could be pain involved, it is so much easier to learn in group flow than under any other circumstances, even if you get to flow solo. So spend a lot of time trying to, like, in athletic endeavor, trying to, like, preconditions for group flow are really, really, really important. And they change too, because interpersonal flow, me and you talking, right? We got great conversation. We got so sucked in. I don't know how much time has passed. You know how much time has passed? That's low-grade micro, right? Micro flow. But it's low-grade micro group flow, which is what we've been experiencing here today. Way, um, delicious and wonderful. Turn up that crank to macro flow and it's, you know, it's sort of mind-blowing in the sort of what, what people can actually accomplish.

It's exciting. And as I kind of feel into the vision of like the future of the human potential, um, I'm also very fascinated with like these cities, right? The Sanskrit term for cities are like kind of these like they they. They're described as like spiritual superpowers that become available.

Oh, the cities. Yeah. That was like. No, no, the cities. Okay. Yeah. Well, you know, by the way, they're spiritual superpowers and they're distractions on the path.

Yeah, absolutely.

They're not, they're not the good thing, they're the bad thing.

For sure. They. Yeah. But I. It's an interesting marker of possibility when you hear about these individuals that tap to this place within themselves that, create these miraculous moments, or what people would see as superhuman. I'm just curious, in closing here, because I know I could go for hours and hours and hours, um, what do you make of when you turn that macro flow dial up to 11 and those states of consciousness become so rapturous that mystical things start happening? I'm curious what—

how I think about it? Yeah. So, um, What I learned sort of early on in my career, um, I don't know where it— I think Dr. Neuber, Andy Neuber, was the first person to have this conversation, but this is how he approached it. And you have— so back in the '90s, the people who sort of laid the foundation for, for what you're doing now and, and things like that, you have to understand, we— it was not like you were risking your career talking about these kinds of things. Dr. Newberg got forced essentially out of the University of Pennsylvania for his research on spiritual topics, right? Like, this was really taboo. So people really— and even writing about it in West of Jesus, which was my first book on this, I was like, if this goes wrong, I'm like a New Age laughingstock whose career is over, right? And I knew it. And I was really— I was scared. Right. And people hear that now and they're like, really? And I'm like, it was a very different time. And it was really easy to flesh a career that way with these kinds of discussions. But what I was taught was, one, if something shows up globally before the era of mass communication, right, before, especially before we have international travel of any kind, trade routes, any sort of like— yes, the Polynesians did manage to, you know, sail enormous, enormous distances with starlight and could navigate most of the whole Pacific. So there was a lot of travel was possible, but it was very, very slow. But I always said if it shows up in multiple cultures, right before we've got telephones and telegraphs and, you know, all that stuff, Um, there's a lot of smoke there. You won't— is it fire? Don't know. But there's enough smoke that you want to take a closer look. This is what happened when we looked at cosmic unity, oneness with everything. Oneness with everything was like this thing— you go back to the '80s, walk into a shrink's office and say, God, I was, you know, I was writing the other day, I got into this state of consciousness, like, like merged with the words and I became one with the universe. You were going to a nuthouse. They were locking you up. Like, that's what was happening, right? And Neuber came along and said, hey, wait a minute, this shows up— we've got Franciscan nuns, we got Tibetan Buddhists, we got— like, we gotta look at this. There's some biology here. So what I've learned is that if it shows up cross-culturally before mass communication, there's probably some kind of biology. Again, biology is just a how, it's not a why. It doesn't tell us anything about the why, but the how shows up. And so that's one. That's the first thing I think about. So when I look at these phenomenon and that has been— now there are certain things. So for example, going back to the cities, one of the cities is levitation. There's zero proof that that's real. There's— I mean, like, people have gone, looked, really tried to figure it out. Nobody's, nobody's come back and said no to the, the, right? There's a bunch of other cities where you're like, oh no, that, like, you know, two people thinking the same thoughts at the same time, that happens a lot in group flow, right? Where you, you get— and it's not quite levitation, and I can sort of talk about pattern recognition and cueing and everything else, but I don't think it gets to the answer, right? Like, I don't— like, I I always say flow can explain synchronicity. It can't explain serendipity. And we know that when you start getting into flow regularly, synchronous things start happening in your life and serendipitous things start happening in your life. And we can explain the first half of it. The second half, you're like, I don't know what this is, right? I have made an argument. There were a bunch of us, John Hagel, Salim Ismail, a couple of other people. Who for a while we were trying to figure out what is luck? How do you codify luck? Can you put science around luck? And I've spent a really long time trying to— thinking that what we actually mean by luck, though this just moves the needle a little bit, it doesn't answer the question, is, um, frequent access to flow, regular flow states, because lucky things start to happen. Now I can explain a lot of it by sort of turning up pattern recognition and your ability to recognize more opportunity in the world and its impact on your mood, and you're less judgmental. And you're like, so you're letting more stuff in, you're noticing more opportunities. And I can use that to explain 60%, 70%, right? Like, it makes sense. But you run into that wall of like, what the hell is this serendipity, synchronicity? And we don't have answers. Maybe it's absolutely nothing. I'm going to argue that there's probably some biology there that we haven't I don't quite know what it is, but to me, these are the reasons this is like— maybe flow has been like a lifelong passion and purpose that's like different from animals in that it doesn't— it hasn't broken me in any way, shape, or form.

I'm also very much in the camp of being comfortable with just, I don't know, saying that and being okay with it and being at ease with that mystery. And I've met certain individuals a couple times in my life where it's very clear they have these spiritual gifts, you know, and, you know, the biology doesn't fully account for the story of consciousness and its various manifestations of what becomes possible within, within certain people's conscious experience. And so I'm just so fascinated as we start to discover more and more of the possibilities of consciousness and what happens with certain individuals that have, that are tapped into ways that I just can't physically explain. Maybe we'll all just, it'll all be explainable one day as that margin continues to shrink as it has been.

But I'm hoping, I'm hoping that we can one day explain that when we, I mean, if I don't get all the, the answers, I'm hoping that you get 'em when you die. Yeah. Like even if just for like a minute, right? I would certainly like, yeah, I'd like the answers.

Well, this conversation has been magical, Stephen. Thank you so much for all the different avenues we've been diving into today. For people that want explore some of these topics more. I have like 4 of your books here: Stealing Fire is Great, The Rise of Superman, The Art of Impossible, all these, a new book, In Our Country, which is available now. We'll link everything down in the description below. Um, any closing thoughts, things that you want to share, where people can be pointed towards, uh, before we wrap up?

Yeah, I'm at @StephenKotler on social media. Uh, stephenkotler.com is my website. FlowResearchCollective.com, Flow Research— it's the the Flow website. If you're interested in training with us at all, getmoreflow.com is, is where, where you, where you go for that.

I think all of your content and your devotion to writing so much and sharing in the way you do help people realize how the extraordinary is possible for the ordinary person and like how we can actually find that in our life. So thank you for all the work that you're doing.

I really appreciate it.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Question for you: when was the time you were in the zone? When you were in so deep that afterward you were stunned by how much you got done, even though very little time had passed? Now you've got bold goals, yet you're slammed with work and you're short on time. You know the heights of productivity you can achieve when you get into the zone because you've been there before, but it's a mild form of torture knowing how productive you're capable of being without access to that level of output all the time. So how do you get into the zone whenever you need it? There's still a lot that we don't know about flow states, but over the last 25 years of researching it, we've learned a lot, and we've shared our findings with thousands of high performers. You're in flow during those moments of total absorption when you're so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Time passes strangely and performance just soars. I mean, motivation and productivity, creativity and innovation, learning and memory, cooperation and collaboration all skyrocket. In some studies, as high as 500% above baseline. Now imagine what you can accomplish if you you could reliably increase your productivity by 5x. And the best part? Flow is accessible to everyone, anywhere, at any time. You don't need to pop a pill. You don't need to be surfing a monster wave. You don't need to meditate on a mountaintop for 10 years to get there. Flow is accessible to you right here, right now. If you'd like to amp up your productivity and get leverage on every second, go to getmoreflow.com. Just think of your 10 out of 10 days when you get more done in the morning than you typically do in a full day. Now imagine if you tapped into that level of performance with push-button consistency every day. All this is possible when you trigger flow frequently and reliably. Just go to getmoreflow.com, unblock your flow, and unlock peak performance.

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