How To Age With Fulfillment

Aging is not just a physical process. It's as much a mental game and a mental process as a physical process. In adult development, there are some really big psychological hurdles we have to clear if we want to enjoy the second half of our lives, if we want access to these superpowers, if we want access to flow over time. You got to know who you are in the world. What are your values? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Right? And how are you going to put that together in a way to live? What you believe in your strengths and who you are, your identity, and what you're doing with most of your time. Right? Like you just can't have that misalignment. By age 30, it's really important to have mostly, not 100%, but mostly solved the crisis of identity. By 40, coming out of this, you need sort of an economic match fit, just that tight. You need to live with passion, purpose, and flow. By 50, this is where it gets a little peculiar. You need to— 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 tallest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

So how are you anyway?

Are you, uh, thank you.

You're, you must be what, 3 months into this promo? Trial?

Where are we? Uh, I'm— well, yeah, but the book's only been out for about a month, so, um, uh, but yeah, I think I probably started. That's about right.

Yeah. How you bearing up?

Uh, it— so the good news is it's— we've had a great winter. All the resorts are still open. It's starting to get warm. Uh, the park has been really fun, and some of the biggest lines that are possible are all in play at all the resorts. So I'm holding up just fine.

Yeah. I mean, this, this is— you're West Coast, right? So isn't this being touted as one of the greatest winters ever, basically?

Yeah. No, I mean, like, literally yesterday I turned to my ski partner and we were making our way back to the car and we came around a corner and I was like, dude, I know we got nothing left, but we have to ski this because it's never going to be open again. Like, yeah, it doesn't— like, this doesn't ever have snow. This is a cliff face. We're skiing it.

Yeah, we had— I, I was living in the French Alps in '99, and I've kind of— because I've been seeing a lot of the posts on Instagram which are like, um, we'll never get another winter like this, you know. This is, this is like going to be one for the books. And we had one like that in '99 which everyone still talks about. Like, I was between Chamonix and Méribel in the French Alps that year, and Yeah, same thing. All the stuff that you dreamed of was basically open. Yeah. Well, you're obviously an expert at doing podcast interviews, as one quick search on Apple Podcasts shows. So my thing is pretty casual. It's definitely a conversation rather than an interrogation. So I just figured, I mean, my audience, I mean, they're definitely squarely going to be interested in this book. I think they're 35 to 55 generally, all massively enthusiastic skateboarders, surfers, snowboarders, climbers, terminal intermediates. So yeah, I figure we start out. Do you want to give us the top line on what the book actually is?

Sure. Jump in. You ready?

Yeah. Yeah, let's do it. I mean, you've got an hour, right? So I figure we go straight in.

Let's do it. So, "Gnar Country," the new book, is a book about peak performance and applied peak performance. So taking the tools of peak performance and flow science and really applying them on a day-to-day basis. What does that look like? Coupled to insights into the new field of peak performance aging. And there the news is really cool. And so what in our country essentially is, since this is an action sports podcast and everybody will like this, it's a whole bunch of discoveries out of peak performance that are sort of bleeding into this new field we're calling peak performance aging that basically say that we can perform at incredibly high levels far later in life than anybody thought possible. And one of the cores of this is there's an old idea, old dogs can't learn new tricks. And there's a whole bunch of breakthroughs in my field in flow science. We can talk more about what that is in a second. But in fields like embodied cognition, network neuroscience, which isn't really a field, but it's the way that network level of the brain works, systems neuroscience really is what it is. A couple other fields that said, hey, wait a minute, old dogs are probably better at learning new tricks than some younger dogs. Everything we thought is wrong. And to test it, I decided to see if I could teach myself how to park ski at age 53. Yeah, park skiing is, you know, everybody listening knows it's the discipline that involves, you know, doing tricks off jumps, on rails, wall rides, boxes, etc. It's very acrobatic.

The bit you normally, uh, happily leave behind as you get to your early 40s.

Well, I mean, there's a general— and there's reasons, right? There's— so that this was why the challenge was so cool. There are 12 different biological reasons why anybody over the age of 35 is going to have a really hard time learning how to park ski. You get to 40, 45, 55, it's impossible. By the time you got to where I started at 53, you're just downright crazy, right? And, or so the theory went. And, you know, the book essentially chronicles that experiment, and the theory was obviously very wrong, which is why there's a book in the end. Um, and using what the kind of the new science of peak performance aging, I learned how to park ski actually faster than I've learned how to do anything. And it wasn't just me. We then reran the experiment with a whole bunch of other people, mostly intermediates, by the way. I had a little— I had no park skiing skill going in, but I was an expert skier. But we reran the experiment with, with a bunch of people ages 29 to 68. So big swatch of folks. Most of them were intermediate skiers or snowboarders. And in 4 days on the hill using the protocol we designed that sort of matches all these things up, and we talk more about that. got them from zero to dangerous. And that was really cool. Um, so that was, that's sort of the story in the book. If I was going to put it into a single sentence as a way to sum it up, uh, at the heart of peak performance is the state of consciousness known as flow. At the heart of peak performance aging is the state of consciousness known as flow. Unfortunately, like a lot of things, our ability to get into flow diminishes over time. Also, like a lot of things that we now know, it's a use-it-or-lose-it skill. So yeah, if you properly train it, we can actually hold on to our ability to get into flow, even advance it, and all these other skills far later in life than anybody thought possible. That's what the book's really about. How do we do that?

Yeah, so you mentioned that, like, the, the can't teach old dogs new tricks thing, and you— and, and I guess in the book you're referring to that as like the kind of accepted wisdom of aging, if you like. I mean, there's another phrase that I can't quite bring to mind right now which you use in the book, which is essentially this well-worn idea that once you hit, like, it's all downhill once you hit a certain—

Yeah, it's a long, slow, the rot theory.

The rot theory. That's what I'm thinking about.

Yeah. And no, and they're tied together because historically, sort of the long, slow rot theory, it's the idea that all our mental skills and our physical skills decline over time. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide.

Which is the accepted wisdom, right? Which is basically what everybody thinks.

Almost to this day, it's the accepted wisdom. And let's just actually start here. The first thing that's shocking is this. When you go into the research, that accepted wisdom, it gets its real start in the modern world in 1907. Freud makes a comment, right? The idea that an old dog can't learn new tricks comes from— that's where the long slow rot theory, it all starts. I mean, people have been kicking it around for ages, right? But Freud makes this comment, and he's at this point the most like popular figure you know, thought leader in the entire world, and it sticks.

That guy again.

Yeah, so, right, that guy again. And by, by like 1995, all we've done is prove Freud right in unbelievable detail. Like, we now know here's exactly how VO2 max starts to decline in our 20s, here's what happens to strength and fast twitch muscle response, and on and on and on. And all our cognitive skills. And then around 1995, holes start showing up in this theory, big holes. And a lot of them were these— they started testing a lot of these ideas rigorously in the '70s in these long-term studies on health and longevity and aging and all this stuff. And they start getting their data in the '90s, and suddenly all these old ideas are proved wrong over the next 25 years. Everything we thought declined over time, we now know it all does decline over time. That doesn't change, but all of it is a use-it-or-lose-it skill. So what the research shows is if we train correctly, um, and it's— and peak performance aging starts young, right? This is not like— you might want to, you know, get busy with this if you're over 50, 60, 70, but like the research says, hey, wait a minute, we got to start paying attention to some of this stuff in our 20s our 30s, because peak performance aging is also successful aging and healthy adult development and like how to be happy and fulfilled over the course of your life and all those questions. And it starts young, um, but we can hang on to them and even advance these skills far later in life than any of you thought possible.

And what was the— what was this you mentioned? So 20, 25 years ago, like, so was that the first time people just began to actively study it, to actively test the veracity of that contention?

Couple of things. So I'll give you one example, uh, the Ohio study of— the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Aging and Retirement. It gets set— started in 1975. We start to get data from it 20 years later because they, they're checking in, seeing how people advance. And like, that's a study that— look, that was the study that one of the coolest things we learn about Aging now is, aging is not just a physical process, is as much a mental game and a mental process, a physical process. Where do these ideas come from? One place is this study. And so one of the things that we're looking at is mindset. And 25 years later, there's enough data that Becca Levy at Yale runs a study where she looks at the impact of mindset on longevity and aging, and she finds out that the people with a positive mindset towards aging. I am thrilled with what's in front of me. The second half of my life is filled with endless possibility. My best days are ahead of me. And by the way, uh, that mindset of old, right, where like the voice in your head starts saying, hey, you're too old for this shit, it's—

you're—

yeah, that starts to show up, fuck, for some of us in like our late 20s.

Yeah, good for me, right?

Yeah. And there's biological reasons why. So the mindset of old, like when I said peak performance aging starts young, one of the reasons is this mindset of old. There's biology underneath, and we could talk about that if you care, but it shows up really young and it has big impact on our health, our longevity, our performance, how we get into flow. Everything starts to shift with that. And if we get a positive mindset towards aging, it results in an extra 8 years of healthy longevity, which is huge. It's amazing. That's giant. So, um, we start figuring that those studies started in the '70s, start showing up. The other thing is you have to remember that this is all the stuff I'm talking about. This is mind-body connection. 1975, when they start doing these studies, nobody believes that's a real thing, right? These are pioneering researchers. And, um, it's funny because a lot of the work comes out of Harvard and Yale, these big-name institutions. And you have to ask why. It's because those are the people, only people we believe, because that mind-body split was so far away, um, that the people who knitted it together, it took a long time. It tons and tons and tons of research for anybody who's willing to believe it is real. So that's some of it. Some of it is we start getting the first real studies on maintaining cognitive function, preventing cognitive decline. And those studies start ramping up in the '90s as well. That's when we start to discover that, like, Alzheimer's, dementia, cognitive decline, they're byproducts of aging, but they're not inevitable, and you can actually train the brain around them and against them in, in really cool ways. So all that stuff starts showing up then. Yeah, gets to like now where you look at like my buddy Adam Gazali, who's a neuroscientist at University of California in San Francisco, probably is sort of the cutting edge of the cognitive stuff. He's developed video games that specifically train parts of the brain and deficits of aging. And by the way, they're the very first video games that are approved in America by the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, right on the COVID of Nature, because the first video games that are prescribed, you go to a doctor, your doctor will write you a script. Wow. Out in the beginning, he was just looking at general cognitive decline, but it's now, okay, so task switching is a problem. You have trouble going from A to B and retaining your focus and everything else. Okay. There's a specific intervention for that and so forth. So it's really gotten very specialized. We— it's not just we know how to preserve the brain, we also know how to train up the things that are going away over time using very specific interventions.

Yeah. So I mean, obviously, as you mentioned earlier, you've—

you've—

one of your specialisms is that— is flow, the study of flow and how we can almost— because I've read a couple of your previous books about that and how I think anyone that's listened to this that's done any of these activities or anyone who's done any sport really, because I think you experience flow in any physical activity personally from anecdotal evidence. Anyone that recognizes that, your work is about how we can harness it almost, if I can paraphrase, how we can cultivate it. That's been the arc of your— In your history, you've been a ski bum, you've you're a journalist, you've started magazines, you've, you know, and you've made a career like out of like all your interests and then this, this, this great topic of study. So when did this topic that like, when did you think, ah, actually this is a brilliant way that I can like use all of the things that I've learned to, to test these principles of peak performance aging? Was it all part of the same arc?

So the All of this came out of work around flow, right? So, uh, one, flow is widely known in psychology and, and neurobiology as the one of the major drivers of adult development. So how do we grow up? One way that we grow up is through flow states. On the other, in flow, we're pushing on our skills, we're using our skills to the utmost, learning is enhanced, performance is enhanced. So we're pushing on our skills to the utmost, we're getting the most out of those skills, and then remembering afterwards what we did. On the other side of flow states, we're more complex, we're more adaptable. Additionally, because our sense of self quiets down in flow, we get more perspective, we get empathy. So on the other side of flow, we're more complex, we're more adaptable, we're wiser, we're more empathetic. This is how we grow up. This Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow psychology, thought this was the main driver of adult development.

Are these the three, the three hurdles of adult development that you talk about?

Oh no, so this is another Peak Performance Aging Starts Young. So this is—

sorry to, sorry to flip around, but this is—

we're jumping all over the place. Um, yeah, I got into this topic through flow. It just came like it was, it was the natural evolution, and a lot of flow scientists ended up here. Csikszentmihalyi spent the tail end of his career working on flow and peak performance aging and things like that. Got it. As well. So this is right, it's just an extension. And the thing that caught my attention is, hey, wait a minute, flow really matters over time. Like, the quality of our— of the second half of our life, usually determined by flow. And yet our ability to get into this state seems to diminish. And can we fix that? Is that a use-it-or-lose-it skill? Is it like the other ones, or is it something different? Turns out it's like the other ones, and we can train it. So that's exactly how I got here. What you're talking about. One of the reasons I thought old dogs can learn new tricks— this is really cool— as we enter our late 40s and our 50s, there are changes in genetics and how the brain processes information. And the result is we gain access to whole new levels of intelligence. Three new styles of thinking basically start coming online in our 50s, um, or 40s and 50s. Aspects, new levels of creativity, including like divergent thinking, which is that far-flung, outside-the-box thinking. It's the hardest to train. And suddenly we gain access to new levels of it. Empathy and wisdom. And wisdom, think of wisdom as like emotional intelligence writ large, coupled to a bunch of other things. But that's a quick shorthand for it. It's a clearly definable neurobiological skill process. Take your pick. It's a real thing. We know what it is. We study it. Really important. And so you gain access to all this stuff. One of the reasons I thought I could be able to learn how to park ski in my 50s is acts, the new levels of creativity, which is what park skiing really requires. It's about the creative interpretation of terrain features with your body, especially the way we were approaching it. So I was like, okay, I've got some advantages here, but if you really want those skills, they're not automatic. So in psychology, psychologists like to talk about things called moderators. It's an if-then condition. If you do this right, you get this. If you do this right, you get this. And it turns out in adult development, there are some really big psychological hurdles we have to clear if we want to enjoy the second half of our lives, if we want access to these superpowers, if we want access to flow over time. By age 30, it's really important to have mostly, not 100%, but mostly solved the crisis of identity. You got to know who you are in the world. What are your values? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Right. And how are you going to put that together in a way to live? By 40, coming out of this, you need sort of an economic match fit, just a tight— you need to live with passion, purpose, and flow, and a tight link between like what you believe in, your strengths, and who you are, your identity, and what you're doing with most of your time, right? Like you just can't have that misalignment. By 50, this is where it gets a little peculiar, you need to forgive yourself, set down shame and self-consciousness, and forgive others who have done you wrong.

And one of the bits I found really fascinating— and carry on though, because I want to— I really want to come back to that bit of the science of it.

So everything we're talking about here that's coming on comes out of our ability to see things from multiple perspectives, right? Really what opens up. And if you're still carrying grudges, pissed off, you're not seeing things from other people's perspectives, right? So, it blocks all of this. Now, to get all these superpowers after self-forgiveness, you can get through that hurdle. What matters next is creativity. So, creative thinking, whether it's, you know, physical creativity, I'm going skiing in the terrain park and I'm going to do creative things, or, you know, I'm writing, doesn't matter, cooking, coding, doesn't really matter. But creative thinking unlocks these skills. So you need a lot of that in your 50s. And then beyond, once you get this stuff, if you want to hang on to it in your late 50s, 60s, and 70s, you have to constantly be training up your risk tolerance because risk aversion increases over time. And if it does, the fear it introduces into the equation ends up blocking learning, blocking wisdom, blocking empathy, blocking creativity. So, you got to counteract that. And the other thing you have to do is train up physical, train against physical fragility. Because what good is a supercharged brain if your body's starting to fall apart? And physical fragility requires training 5 categories of fitness: strength, stamina, flexibility, agility, and balance. They all decline over time. We have to train all 5. There's very specific, like the World Health Organization knows how much time you're supposed to to spend each week training all those things. Or bonus for everybody listening, everything I just described is, is dynamic motion. If you're involved in a dynamic activity— skiing, surfing, snowboarding, rock climbing— you're using all 5 of those things at once. Turns out action sports are phenomenal sort of longevity tools, anti-aging medicines, and all that stuff. This is one of the reasons why. And here's a bonus: when we have to sort of coordinate strength and balance and ability, like all at once stamina in sports like skiing or snowboarding, these kinds of things. That dynamic motion, besides training up all 5 categories of the body that you need to preserve, it actually promotes angiogenesis and neurogenesis. So big words, but angiogenesis is the birth of new vasculature in the brain, new blood vessels, um, that oxygenate the brain so it's energy. And neurogenesis is new neurons. So you want to stave off Alzheimer's, cognitive decline, dementia. You need neurogenesis. And it turns out dynamic motion not only preserves our physical function, it amplifies brain function. And you can see this— they chart— the Mayo Clinic did this— which activities, physical activities, give you the most longevity and health. And the list starts with like, I joined a health club and you get about a year, 1.1, a year and a month. So 13 months, uh, swimming is like 3.1 years, or running is 3.1 years, swimming is 3.6 years. Then you get into more dynamic activities. Soccer is like 6 years. Badminton is actually better than soccer. It's like 7. Tennis is better than badminton. It's 9. And then you get into the action sports, which are like, if you can play safely, 10, 11. You get— you add much more because they do all this function, all this for you.

So action sports is the perfect kind of nexus then for all these, like, circumstances that you're talking about to achieve this peak performance aging. So we'll get to that in a minute because obviously that's kind of what the book's about. And what I will say, like, the book is great, and that thing that, you know, you just spent 5 minutes describing that really quickly, but obviously that is a huge part of the book, like, all like that, this, this foundational understanding of these principles. So for anyone listening, to dig into more of that because it is fascinating. And I know most people listening will find this fascinating. That's a huge part of the book. But one thing I did want to ask you about is this— is the risks/fear. Well, I think it's risk. You characterize it as risk aversion being important. And I think you just said because it has a cognitive function and it can impair creativity. Am I paraphrasing correctly there? Yeah.

Let me give you a little bit more of the science. When—

please do, because I was really fascinated.

When we're, when we're afraid, the brain produces cortisol, stress hormone, and norepinephrine. Norepinephrine is essentially— low doses is curiosity, high doses anxiety. Yeah. Um, and the more norepinephrine in your system— so a little norepinephrine primes the brain for learning. Too much, I'm anxious, it actually blocks learning. Because the brain is too busy solving the problem in front of you to bother with all that, right?

Yeah.

So learning gets blocked. The more norepinephrine in your system, the part of your brain that says, am I gonna find a, like, a tight link between ideas, like, oh, here's this thing and here's the standard response, or am I going to take the time and find something unusual, a cool connection, outside the box thinking, divergent thinking, that's the anterior cingulate cortex. X does that. And the more norepinephrine in your system, the more conservative it gets. Because if you're in a dangerous situation, right, a lot of fear, you don't want creative solutions. Give me the thing that works 100% of the time, right? Like, tried, true, conservative state. Give me that. I don't have time for all— right? Um, we also know that the more norepinephrine in your system, the more selfish you become. So, right, the more scared you are, protect the organism, protect the organism, the less you're thinking about other people, right? So that blocks empathy and wisdom. And to boot, on top of all of this, norepinephrine, too much norepinephrine blocks flow. So flow has this primary trigger. One of its main triggers is challenge-skill sweet spot. I talked about it earlier. Flow follows focus, right? That's when the stoat shows up. It's because all our attention is on the here and now. We pay the most attention to what we're doing, the task, when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set. You want to stretch but not snap. So, um, too much norepinephrine, too much anxiety, you're being pushed out of that sweet spot. So it's blocking flow. And to boot, the older you get, the more you have that mindset of old, and the more you have— you face challenges in your life that lead to stress. Those two combinations over time— and remember I said our access to flow shrinks over time?

Yeah.

One of the things that happens is the challenge-skill sweet spot shrinks because of allostatic load. Allostatic load is the impact of stress over time on our physiology and our psychology, and that it shrinks down the challenge-skill sweet spot. So, or this changes how you want to approach activities later in life, but it also speaks right here that, like, once the sweet spot starts to shrink down, any anxiety in the system is going to start blocking flow. So on top of all the other penalties, you're going to block the state of peak performance that you really need to achieve your goals later in life. So that there's a huge penalty here for not training up risk aversion. We're not training our risk aversion.

And this obviously applies to non-physical scenarios as well, right?

Oh, like, no, no, yeah. And let me— so physical risk is great, right? But I mean, I can't tell you— I, I would say at least, well, a lot of the people I know in this world are professional action sport athletes, right? And the most interesting thing for me is always watching them transition out of action sports into whatever they're going to do next. Yeah, just see people who you're like, you're the bravest motherfucker in the history of the universe and you can't walk into a meeting and open your mouth and talk, right?

That's what I'm sort of getting at, because I think, I think one of the things I found— I'm just gonna quickly give you a little anecdote personally to, to, to, to tell you how I was. So I, I recognize a lot in what you said. So I used to run a snowboarding magazine, and I also spent most of my 20s, um, chasing very, very good athletes around the mountain. And I really recognized that, um, I mean, this is probably pretty niche between— but that, that thing you talked about, like how that impacted your self-esteem, like I really recognize that.

And, and, um, and oh my God, you're actually talking about the experience I had where like—

yeah, yeah, I'm literally— I'm, I'm literally—

you think you're a freaking badass athlete, you get out to the mountain with actual professional athletes.

Yeah, I'm talking, I'm talking about that.

You really are Oh my God, it's crippling self-consciousness.

Exactly. And I, and I, so I, I had a really similar experience, 10 years traveling with action sports athletes who are a million times better than me. And, and, and I guess what was interesting for me is like when I got to like my 30s and 40s, I actually made quite a lot of peace with that. And I was actually a bit like, you know what, like I don't— I'm actually quite— I don't really care about that anymore, which is quite a liberating thing. And I just found it really interesting that it seems to, it seems to have been an itch that you've really had to scratch. Like, you know, like, so it—

but it got built out of me as a punk rock kid not getting along with, with the jocks, right? The athletes.

And this, and this is what I found so fascinating about this whole part of your story, because obviously, like, there's, it's a big thread of the book, you know. You talk about it quite a lot through the book. You talk about, like, circle of shame. You talk about being this kid at school. You talk about Alex, how you got into punk. You know, there's this real thread. So can you talk to me about that?

Because, you know, so one, you know, it's one thing to talk about, oh, in your 50s you gotta set down shame and self-consciousness and forgive others, right?

Like, but that's, you know, that's what I'm getting at.

That's a big deal, right? Like, that's not like, what I gotta do? What? Are you kidding me? Like, like, and, and when I— and so it's interesting because the standard tool for forgiveness, uh, in psychology, uh, and, you know, peak performance is loving-kindness meditation, compassion, right? And it's a phenomenal tool, and it, it's got— I mean, I can— performance benefits and anti-aging benefits, and I go on and on and on. But there's some stuff that it was like, I was just so pissed at some folks from my like early childhood. Like they, you know, they had done some damage and I just like, I could do loving kindness meditation all day and this shit, I'm not putting it down. And some of that, like that can get compounded after you ski with professional athletes for 10 years. And it's so humbling. And, you know, we used to joke around, I helped start Freeze Magazine, which was the first sort of extreme ski magazine. Every journalist on staff there got PTSD. Every one of us, we got PTSD from going on assignment and chasing professional athletes around mountain.

Like, again, I empathize.

You totally have to understand that other people hear that, they're like, what? And I'm like, oh no, you have no— like, you don't understand.

It's still, it's still a thing. Like, it's still totally a thing. Like, it's a— because it's a behavioral loop, isn't it, that you get yourself in basically.

I, um, and I had to figure out how to put it down. Yeah, like, if it's gonna block my ability to get into flow over time, among other things, right? One of the things that— so the other component in the challenge-skill sweet spot, okay, how— what do we mean by challenge? What do we mean by skills? This is a question that scientists have been poking at for a while. One of the big answers is confidence. Confidence is an enormous enormous part of where you are in the challenge-skill sweet spot. And if that diminishes over time, carrying this weight into my, into my 50s, not only is it going to block adult development and my ability to be happy and fulfilled and everything else I could have in my life, it's going to start blocking flow even more because everything's shrinking. And so it was, in my opinion, I was like, okay, this is crisis time. Like, so I— what I did, that was another thing I did with Our Country, is I'm a big fan of missions, creating a mission, right? When it's, it's sort of— I covered in my book The Art of Impossible a lot of the science of goal setting, and there's a very precise science for how we set goals as biological organisms. But in our country, I add the last part to it, which is set up all your goals and your different levels of goals and all that stuff, but tie them all together in a mission.

Yeah.

Which is a way to like go out and actually, you know, do that. And You know, there's— being on a mission does something really weird to the brain. Like, anybody who's ever been involved in, like, you know, either big, you know, action sport— I'm gonna go climb Everest or that sort of thing— or anybody who's been involved in a startup, right, like where you have your— that kind of mission, you know that, like, you function differently. You're much more motivated, you're much more willing to take chances, you're much more willing to sort of do all this stuff. And so I created a mission for myself, learn how to park ski. That was a— it's— this is an athletic mission. Like, I've never done anything like that in my life because challenging myself like that would just expose all these weaknesses. So I specifically realized that the only way I could be successful is if I turn myself into one of those goddamn jocks. My childhood, right? Like, I forced myself to go walk a mile in their moccasins, to use the cliché. Yeah. And it was a very effective way because what I am clear, so clear on now that, you know, uh, was what, like, how much those people who tortured me through my childhood brought to my life. I don't get to go on this mission without them. So like, I loved it. Like, I loved every moment of it. And it was an amazing thing to get to do. And so it totally brought it full circle. And really paid that off. And I'm glad you— I just have to say this. I appreciate the fact that that spoke to you in the book. I went back and forth like that much. It's, you know, like, do I tell people this? Do I not tell people this? Do I want to do this? Do I want— and I did it because I was like, you know, I think people, and especially the people I know coming out of action sports, are going to appreciate this because it's super honest.

And also what I found really fascinating about it was it's the perfect kind of, you know, obviously you've used this there's two layers. This isn't— it is like, I'm going to road test the— I'm going to use the feat of trying to learn to park ski to road test these ideas I'm exploring and understanding. But equally, you've got unfinished personal business, which, which really comes across. And you kind of, you kind of— because there's one point where you, I think you find yourself in the park or you find yourself in a gully. There's something— there's people around, though. You know, one of the comments that you make quite a few times in the book is like, I prefer to ski alone. And I prefer not to do things in front of a crowd, but you're in a situation where you have to. And I'm guessing that previously you might have shied away from that and you actually perform and you deliver and you're like, it's a fuck it.

Thank you for tuning in to Flow Research Collective Radio. And please pardon the brief interruption. I've got a question for you. Do you have great ideas and big goals? My assumption is you have more skills than most knowledge workers. You're paid well to use your brain. 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, but all the time. On your best days, you can get 10 times more work done in half the time, and it feels nearly effortless. Pointless, and it's enjoyable, and it's energizing. At the end of a 10 out of 10 day, you hit the pillow that night feeling unstoppable. Now, this level of extreme accomplishment is its own reward, but you get the external rewards too by excelling in your profession and your craft. Now, with 10 out of 10 days, you exceed your own expectations and surprise yourself with what 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.

You know what I mean? Like, to those, those people in my youth that— so you've clearly, you know, like, the two layers I found really fascinating, but you, you hinted at it earlier, if you don't mind the question. That, that, that there is a seeming contradiction with that, with the, the, the, the, the fifth, the sixth decade hurdle of forgiving people that have wronged you, the, the being kind to yourself, the self-compassion thing that you talk about quite a lot in the book. I mean, I guess that's the question, is did, did there seem to be like a, uh, you know, in a, some, a bit of an opposition there with, with, with that stated goal of self-compassion, forgiving people, and also this mission to prove these people wrong?

Well, okay, so two things. I'm a big believer in what we talk about at the Flow Research Collective when we train people, stacking motivations. Yeah, right. Uh, athletes know this. You, you, you, you stack fuel sources, right? So you never show up at the hill if you— or whatever you're doing, if you can avoid it, without— you know, you've eaten carbs, you've eaten proteins, you've eaten fats, you're hydrated, you've gotten a good night's sleep, you've recovered, blah, blah, blah. You're stacking fuel sources, as many available fuel sources as you possibly can. You got snacks in your pocket, right? Same— want to do the same thing with motivation, right? And there are 5 big intrinsic motivators that I talk about a lot in the country. Autonomy— excuse me, curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. And they're designed to work together. But there are additional motivators, small-ass spite, what, you know, coaches for years have talked about as bulletin board material, somebody telling you you can't, that sort of stuff. That's what I was using this as, right? Additional motivation. And there was a clock on it too, right? Like I knew that like, oh wow, I'm in my 50s. This really applies to me. They're talking specifically to me. You know, if I would have known this was coming, in a sense, I probably would have started a lot earlier, but, you know, didn't. And like got the information, was like, oh shit, got to do this now. Um, so I like the added thrust, the fact that like it was a sort of a, a fuck you to them, that like that spite is a motivator. Because in the end, right, what happens is I end up in group flow, right, with like You know, the, the scene you're talking about, there were 30 professional snowboarders dropping into a slopestyle field basically at once, and I beat them into the thing and was like chased by them. We had a blast, um, all at once, and there was this great group flow. We'd be feeding off each other's session, and, um, you know, I had to become— I had to basically become them, but I didn't like One, I didn't really see that coming, right? Like, that happened. Like, this was— I didn't know where it was going. You have to also remember that, like, hindsight is great on this one. When I started the book, I didn't think I was going to be able to learn how to park ski. I didn't think I was going to be able to learn how to forgive those people who had done me wrong. I didn't— like, this was like— I was out of my mind, uh, according to most people, to, like, embark on this adventure. And I felt a little bit that that way too. So, um, some of it was, you know, how the story ended up getting told.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm with you. I just thought it was really, really fascinating, that part of it. Um, so I also—

the other thing that you got to remember is, like, the other thing the book was— that this is useful for is the— one of the things that's hardest— we train people at the Flourish Collective in like 130 countries all over the world. We train everybody you could possibly imagine, from individuals to professional athletes to companies and whatever. And the hardest thing in training all these folks is explaining what applied peak performance looks like, right? So flow states— people always want more flow. Flow states have triggers. We talked about the challenge-skill balance. There's 26 in all. If you know how they work, um, and when to use them, you're, you're dangerous. Flow is also a 4-stage cycle. It's a process. So if you know where you are in the cycle, you have a map of the territory. Those are the two things we teach people. But the question they have is like, how do I apply this in a real-world situation? Like, and on a day-to-day basis? And that's what you get in the book. You get, hey, I showed up at the mountain. I was facing a health challenge, right? I had re-aggravated an injury. I was tired. I had gotten in a fight with my wife or, you know, was that some emotional stuff going on? And yet I still— I had a job to do and I needed to get into flow. And what did I do? Or I showed up at the hill feeling self-conscious for this reason and anxiety for this reason, and I had a job to do and I need to get into flow. And what's the recipe in that circumstance? And that, um, is the other thing I think the self-consciousness and some of the psychological stuff is useful for, because what the book is trying to do and that stuff is like, hey, these are situations we all face every day. Like, I was facing them on the mountain, but we face them at work, we face them in our personal life, and Oftentimes flow is the solution we're seeking. How do you get from point A to point B? That's what I was trying to cover in the book.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, it's kind of the question I was going to ask, like structurally the book is set out— first half is obviously, you know, exploring your adventures through park skiing and how you applied all these principles. But then the second half of the book is, is more like, well, here's how— here's the protocol as you described it. That I used to do this and how this can be applied to individuals and to different people's lives. And I guess that's why I focused on the risk element, because just to slightly come back to that, because obviously it just doesn't, you know, reading it, I was a bit like, well, it doesn't need that. That can just be a metaphor. It doesn't need to be literally like you need to put yourself in physical danger, as you mentioned. It could be something like, oh no, emotional risk. Exactly.

Yeah. So let's do the science here because the science is what's useful. So flow follows focus. It only shows up when a lot of attention is in the here and now. I said the flow triggers drive attention into the now. That's what they all do. They drive focus. They do it a bunch of different ways. One of the main things a lot of the triggers do is they do their work by pushing dopamine into our system. Dopamine is a performance-enhancing chemical that amplifies fast-twitch muscle response, pattern recognition, uh, it, uh, boosts, um, creativity. Learning rates go up. And it's also focus and attention and excitement, right? We feel it as like when dopamine's in our system, we are paying attention to the thing that's in front of us because it's delicious and we love it and it's great. Now, what— where do we get dopamine? There's a lot of different sources, and these are all flow triggers. Uh, curiosity. Produces dopamine. Passion produces dopamine. When we're, uh, striving towards our goals, we get a little dopamine. When we take a risk, we get dopamine. Physical risk, emotional risk, creative risk, social risk. Pattern recognition— when we link ideas together in a novel way, um, we get dopamine. This could be pattern recognition on the mountain. I see a, a terrain feature, I go, that looks perfect for a flat spin 180, or, you know, whatever I want to throw. That's not even a track court.

I know what you mean.

I know what you mean. Throw a flat spin 180. I don't actually know what I was thinking on that one. Um, you'd have to stop your rotation, be weird.

Anyway, it could— but it could be, it could be you're writing a, a huge school paper with lots of complex, um, concepts that are difficult for you that you've managed to marshal into coherent form. It could be that, you know.

Yeah, exactly. And so all of these things produce dopamine, right? That's what we're trying to get at. And one of the things— so I tell people, risk is a stupid flow trigger. Um, risk is what you really want to take once you're in flow to extend the state. That's when you use flow as risk as a thing, because you're performing at your best, you've got your best chance of success. So you really, on the front end, to get into flow, you, you're looking for slightly different triggers. So one of the things that we did in the terrain park, for example, is we taught people to creatively interpret terrain features. So we taught them foundational movements. Park skiing is essentially slashing, grinding, a 180, a 360, skiing, riding backwards, jumping, and shifting. Those are the basic core movements. So we taught people 2 new movements a day and just how to move your body in a new way and take an established motor pattern, something you do 100% of the time, with no fear, no conscious interference, and build on that. And we did this because we knew everybody knew how to hockey stop. They were all intermediates. So if you raise the angle of a hockey stop, as you know, depending on where you put your hips, that's a grind or a slash. Yeah, right. And so if I've got you doing a hockey stop across a snow berm that's like 2 inches high, you're now grinding. We knew everybody could do that. So the goal was Teach them how to creatively interpret the terrain features. That's creativity. You're looking at a snowbank and going, oh wow, I can grind that. Pattern recognition. You get a bunch of those little creative decisions in a row, you've actually equaled the amount of dopamine you would get from a big physical risk. So you can ease into flow that way. Or for example, to go back to like, you know, a business setting. Right? You, let's say you're going in to give a presentation. That's a big risk, right? You can use risk as a flow trigger and maybe it'll work for you. But if you're a little too scared, you're a little out of that challenge-skill sweet spot, didn't get enough sleep the night before, that's maybe not the best idea. So what you would rather do is, one, do something that regulates your nervous system on the front end, a breathing exercise, a gratitude practice, something to lower those norepinephrine levels, and then before you go in, and we do this all the time, you'll get with your friends and you'll start joking around and teasing and making everybody laugh. Why are you doing that? Well, because when we put a joke together and we laugh, that's pattern recognition. That's dopamine. That feel good, that good feeling we get. So when you're on the chairlift about to ski or snowboard a gnarly line and you're joking with your friends, what are you doing? You're trying to put patterns together to create little bits of dopamine so that you're closer to flow. So when you get into that line, it's not such a big leap. We do this anyways. Yeah, but doing it a little more consciously. I'll give you an example for me as a writer. So I'm very prolific and people like to point out like that I've written 14 books and how did you do that and blah, blah. And one of the reasons is I have a high flow protocol with my writing. I start every writing session. Facing a blank page is just as difficult for me as it is for anybody, right? But I start every writing session by editing what I wrote the day before. Editing is pattern recognition. Yeah, I make— I'm micro-tuning this. I'm like, so if I edit what I wrote the day before, before I face the blank page, I've got a much better chance of luring myself into flow before I have to take the big risk of the blank page.

You know, do you know the Hemingway— sorry to interrupt you, but you know the Hemingway anecdote about that? Apparently used to leave, leave his last page till the next day. So he knew—

so I, I wrote about that in Art of Impossible. Well, I actually heard about it— Hemingway did it. I learned it from, in an interview from Gabriel García Márquez, who also did it.

Um, but that's the same thing, right? That's the flow trick.

Well, that— so what that is about is, uh, one, easy access to pattern recognition, because you're going to recognize yesterday's pattern. Two, motivation, right? If you So you can do this as an athlete. I did this. I'll give you an example. I did this yesterday. Uh, I was in the terrain park, I was skiing. I had like, with my partner, I had like 5 or 6 really great laps in a row, and I was super pumped up. And my partner had to split, he had to go back to work. And he was like— and I was like, I'm gonna get off the hill now. And he's like, really? And I was like, I've only got about another hour left in me physically, but I'm gonna quit now because I'm really fired up. Because I just, you know, hit a whole bunch of stuff in a row that was, you know, uh, really cool, and it's going to motivate me to come back tomorrow because now I'm excited, right? Um, rather than, you know, burning myself out and ending with like a crushing defeat or falling down and hurting myself, and that's my last memory.

Yeah.

And, uh, Josh Waitzkin, uh, who wrote The Art of Learning, takes this one step farther. He will argue that like for skiers when you're coming off, or snowboard's coming off the run, for these exact same reasons, the most important turns are the last 3 turns you make before you get to the lift, because the lift is going to be that break, and you're on— you're doing the same thing on a smaller scale. So I think that's interesting. Yeah, try playing with that a little bit.

Yeah, so I mean, like, as you mentioned, I mean, a lot of what you discuss in the book and a lot of your work, it is It is things that we can instinctively recognize as behavioral patterns. But what's really fascinating about your work is how you can apply these practical things to improve your life, basically. Because I mean, I just was listening to you then because I'm a writer and I'm a journalist and I still have problems sometimes if I've got a particularly— I've actually got a particularly challenging piece of work I need to do right now and I have been putting it off. But then I know that when I do it and it will be challenging, and I've never really thought about this until our conversation, until reading the book. But what has helped me understand is what's actually going on there. And then also the value that you get from when you push yourself through it, you do it, it's hard, and then you get the sense of satisfaction. And then all those— I mean, that's this process in microcosm, isn't it? The other thing I found quite interesting was that Glen Plake anecdote about you and him on Mount Hood, I think it is, when— because, you know, I think you're skiing.

I mean, this was the same lesson: don't use risk as a flow trigger. Yeah, it was a— Glenn and I were— it was the first time anybody ever taught me, um, flow states had triggers, and there was a way— like, it was the very—

yeah, really fast, really fascinating.

That we weren't— do you want— should I tell the story?

Yeah, please do. I mean, everyone loves a bit of Glen Hood.

And we were hiking and skiing some of the, the gnarlier chutes up top. It was really late season. I want to say it was like August or September, October. There wasn't a whole lot of snow left. And, um, we were about to ski a pretty steep chute, and everything was melted out, so like there were cliffs on all sides. And it was, I don't know, high 40s, low 50s, um, and with cliffs everywhere. And Glenn backs up like 50 yards and skates in, and there's a mogul sort of right in front of the chute, pops off the mogul into the air and executes an airplane turn, turns 180 degrees, drops into the chute and skis it. And I ski after him and I'm like, afterwards I just was like, dude, what the fuck are you doing? Like, why would you do— like, you know, why would you do something dumb and dangerous before we're about to do something dumb and dangerous. Like, what is going on? And, you know, I'm paraphrasing this like 35 years later, but Glenn said something like, dude, you don't get it. Something about being weightless in the middle of the airplane turn that drops me into the zone. And so by the time I've landed in the chute, I'm already in the zone and I'm dialed in and can ski the chute. And what Glenn was talking about, we now know, is— so earlier you said, I think all physical activity produces flow. One of the reasons is just this, and an airplane turn really amplifies it. When we are involved in multisensory experiences, experiences that demand sight, sound, proprioception, all that, everything we got, there's no room for anything else. It drives attention to the present moment, right? So an airplane turn, first it's got novelty. That's another flow trigger because it's this novel sensation of weightlessness. Then it's got these embodied sensations where you're using all your senses at once. There's a little risk involved, but it's a tiny risk, especially if you're a skier like Plake, right? Tiny, tiny, tiny risk. And so he's stacking a bunch of flow triggers really quickly right at the front end of this gnarly thing. And, you know, it's great advice if you can, you know, as most people know, if you can like jump into the hard thing that you're trying to ski or snowboard and actually stick the landing. Yeah. If you can control the speed, you're going to have a much better experience. Yeah.

So, I mean, I got— I've wanted to ask you this question since I've read your first book, actually. I think we've got about 10 left for time, so I've got an eye on the clock. I mean, everyone can recognize the moments that we're talking about personally. You know, anyone that's listening to this, you know, I play a lot of soccer, as you'd call it, play a lot of football. And one of the things that always, like, every now and again, maybe once every like 10 games, I'll do something which I'm like, where the fuck did that come from? Like, and it will almost be like an out-of-body experience. You know, I'll score like a good goal or I'll have a good touch. Like, you know, I'm a fucking hopeless footballer. But like, and it's the same. I surfed, I was in the Maldives a couple of years ago and I had one session where I almost felt like I was I mean, everyone was going like, fucking hell, what do you have for breakfast? Kind of thing. And we all recognize those moments. And obviously your work is about teaching people how to mindfully cultivate those moments and ultimately to have a more fulfilled life, to summarize. But the question I've got for you is, is the difference between amateurs like us and professionals the ability to mindfully call upon that flow space to achieve the results?

Yeah, it's interesting. I can actually, um, I can answer this very specifically. Um, so, uh, there are obviously a bunch of differences.

Yeah, of course, of course. Yeah.

Um, but, but you're not wrong. So Red Bull did this work with a Dr. Leslie Sheerlin on flow. And this is one of the things that they discovered is that— so, uh, I got to give you a little neurobiology. When we're in flow, brainwaves shift. So right now, we're, uh, our brains are producing beta waves. It's a fast-moving wave. It means awake, alert. Slightly slower, the brain in daydreaming mode, that's an alpha wave. This is the brainwave that's usually associated with creativity. Below that, even slower still, is a theta wave. This is where we are usually within REM sleep. So flow actually takes place on the borderline between alpha and theta. It's down there. So every time you make a decision, right, your brain goes through a decision cycle. and it requires a bunch of different brainwaves. So even if you're in flow, you're down at this alpha-theta cycle, um, and you have to make a decision, right? I'm in flow and I'm gonna— am I going right or left on the trail, right? Kind of thing. Your brain has to run the traps and go, and it's going to go up into high beta or into beta at a certain point. One of the main differences between, uh, pros and amateurs is amateurs get stuck up there, right? You start running the traps of, oh, what are the consequences of right and left? And you're kicked out of flow, um, and into fear or anxiety. And professionals get up there and they're like, they run all that and then they can drop back down to that alpha theta borderline. So it's this sort of fluidity. Yeah. The other thing is this. Now, the Flow Research Collective, uh, As I said, we train a lot of people. Um, the point I'm trying to make here is, uh, our training is about 8 weeks long. It's intense. You go through it with a PhD psychologist or a neuroscientist as a coach. There's a lot of work. It's not light. But on the back end, we measure everything pre and post. And so we see on average, we're training tens of thousands of people every month, a 70 to 80% increase in flow. The point here is really trainable. Very, very trainable. Most peak performers, most type top performers, as you pointed out earlier, if you've learned anything and gotten good at anything, you've used flow to do it. So you already are playing these games. You're just not aware of that, right? What happens with better performers is they get not just more aware that they're playing the games, they start to figure out, oh, these are the flow triggers that work best for me in this situation that even if you don't know what the name is, Yeah, these behaviors, right? What you're still doing, because peak flow is how the— we humans do peak performance. It's anytime we're performing at our best, it's likely to be present. So peak performers, anybody who's good at what they do, right, um, is naturally going to move in this direction because it's just the biology. This is how we're hardwired to do it. And those people who become a little more aware of their biology, get a little better at their emotional regulation, Oftentimes, you know, it's interesting, you see it's not really the difference between who triumphs in their early 20s, but like career longevity. How do you go from like, I had a kick-ass season, you know, and was in the X Games, to, oh no, I'm a legend, I've actually reshaped the sport? And one of the things that you see often is people get hurt, um, in their mid-20s, mid to late 20s. And coming back from that injury, they realize, oh, physically I'm not what I was. I have to get really good at the mental game. And so you see it like in everybody's career. Danny Way was this way. Shane McConkey was this way. A bunch of these people who became legends, you see they have to make— Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan— they have to make this shift from, oh, I can get by on physical stuff alone, to, oh no, there's a mental game here. What's that? That's really— these are a lot of the differences. A lot of this stuff is very trainable, right? And I think oftentimes with what you're seeing with professional athletes is they just figured out how to train themselves.

Yeah.

Along the way. Right.

Yeah. Fascinating. Fascinating.

It's about— I mean, one of the things that I've learned after 40 years of skiing and chasing pros around is like there was a point when I started keeping up with pros, right? Uh, not if we're in Alaska, not if we're deep in the backcountry, but in the resorts. Yeah, most of the times, right? We're getting to the chairlift at the same time, I'm skiing the same speeds, blah blah blah, right? It took— that was a— that was like 20 years worth of chasing pros around. But what you start to see, what I've started to see, I'm sure you got some of this, is, oh wow, I see the progression path that gets me to pro. I don't like— I may not want to walk it, it may not be interesting to me, um, but you can— it— what was invisible suddenly starts to become visible, and you're like, oh, I see how this happens now. I may not want to do it, but it's no longer this like magic trick that is like this level of talent. You start to see it, and you start to realize the same thing everybody realizes, which is just it's a progression. There are steps. And, you know, what they managed to do is get farther faster. So what knowledge of flow and flow science does is allows you to get farther faster in the same way that they did. Yeah. Leveraging the same tools. This is, by the way, you know, essentially how I taught myself how to park ski in a single season, right? At age 53, it was the same, same. There was no other way I was going to do it. It's the same thing.

Yeah. Have you got time for one more? It's been really interesting. Thank you. Well, it's actually about your drive because you mentioned earlier a bit of a throwaway comment, 14 books, the schedule as well in the book, up at 3, writing for 4 hours, walking the dog. It's formidable even for very motivated people.

So, well, you have—

okay, so you have—

that was the schedule during the mission.

Sure.

Right.

So I get the mission, but clearly you're no slouch when it comes to drive.

No. And I— and that schedule isn't much different than what I normally do. It just was a little earlier.

So is this related to the fuck you to the jocks? If not to— not to— not to bring Freud back into the conversation. But I did wonder where it came from.

It comes from a lot of different places. I have always— I've always been pretty motivated. Like, I'm very curious. I've always been pretty passionate. Like, you know, all those things haven't been an issue, but I've always been very good at stacking motivation, right? Grit is a last resort for for me. Like, it's not, you know, I don't turn to grit until after I've explored every other possible motivator I, I, I can use. So I've, I've always done a lot of that. Um, and some of it is, and I talk about this very early in the book, and we definitely train people on this, um, when we do our Peak Performance Aging training. I learned— so I was very sick. I had Lyme disease. When I was 30, spent 3 years in bed. Uh, and on the other side of Lyme disease, it was very— everybody goes through a long illness, this happens. You're just like, oh my God, you could, you, you can lose— it can go away in a second. Don't waste any time. Right. And I, and so I, when you're recovering from Lyme disease, one, so the early rising was always easy for me. Two, when I started my career as a journalist, I lived on the West Coast, but everybody I worked for was on the East Coast. And I wanted to write books. So I knew they were going to start phoning me as soon as they got to the office with assignments, and I knew I needed to work on my shit before, because I was so young and so poor and so hungry, I was going to say yes to anything. So like, I started pushing my system back. After Lyme disease, I realized that like all I really wanted to do was surf and write. Like, those were like that. I didn't want to— like, nothing else. Those were my number one and number two priorities depending on the day. And I was like, I, I didn't have energy for a social life. I only had energy for like those two things. And it was either like I was gonna go on dates and have a social life, and I, you know, I was still single at the time, um, I was gonna have friends, or I was gonna— right. And I just— so I just started moving stuff out of my life that wasn't my, my top pleasures and You know, I use a lot of filters like that, so I don't tend to waste time on a lot of lesser pleasures. A lot of people waste a lot of time on a lot of, you know, lesser passions, lesser per— you know, I just don't do that, um, at all. And it's— and it improves the quality of your life tremendously because it means that everything you're doing is stuff you're deeply passionate about, um, which improves motivation as well. So like, I do a lot of stuff along those lines for motivation. It— I always say to people, and this is the other thing about writing, and I think you'll kind of agree with me, anybody who's in any creative activity, early on in your career, you sort of have to learn how to turn pain into creativity. You turn pain into words, you turn pain into sculpture or whatever. Later, you get better at all the other emotions and you learn to turn those into art as well. But part of it is that your craft becomes your salvation. It's where you run when you need someplace to run. And knowing that it's true, you know what I mean? Like that's also part of it is like when shit's going wrong in my life, I run towards skiing. I run towards writing. Those are the things I run towards. So I think it's so important. It's a combination of that and just like, you know, a little bit of self-awareness along the way in terms of how I filter my days. It's my— it looks— it really looks gritty on the outside, and I know that it doesn't feel that gritty on the inside.

I kind of thought— I kind of thought that might be something along the lines of how you'd answer.

Yeah, I say that. I mean, I say that in the book. It doesn't matter. Everybody has this comment there. They still see all the the grit, and I'm like, it's not grit. If that was grit, I couldn't do it. Yeah, I couldn't. I'm not that gritty. I'm not that freaking tough, right? I'm really not. If that was grit, I would get my ass kicked. It, it's leveraging all the other motivators and flow, because flow underpins happiness and well-being and life satisfaction and joy, and it's the reboot. So if you can stack your motivators and regular access to flow, that's motive, that, that, that's just for progress. That's momentum, this progression. Um, you're not really leaning on grit too much.

Yeah, which is the older I get, what I'm increasingly convinced, as in forward movement is the point of life, really, of any, of any type, really, just some kind of progress. Um, but Stephen, thank you so much. That was great.

It's Josh through it with the production team. And one of the biggest challenges of high performers is a lack of time or inefficient time management. Now, without leverage on your time, it doesn't matter the size of opportunities that come your way. It doesn't matter how excited you are about pursuing your goals. Time scarcity or poor time management blocks you from performing at your best. But here's the good news: you don't necessarily need more time. What matters is more flow. Research shows that a flow state makes you up to 500% more productive within the tiny bit of time that you have. Flow is the experience of being in the zone. It's a state of total immersion and focus where you feel limitless and you perform at the highest level. Flow Research Collective is founded by Pulitzer Prize nominee Steven Kotler, and we've trained thousands of high achievers to free up more time through flow. Here's the sad truth that we've seen: most skilled professionals find flow by accident. It's intermittent and inconsistent instead of inevitable. But what happens when you make flow a readily accessible automatic part of your day, as natural to you as breathing, eating, or tying your shoes, for example? Well, for starters, time constraints start to matter a whole lot less. Now, multiplying your productivity by 5x sounds hyperbolic, so let's just back up a minute. Even if you only double what you can currently get done in a given day, wouldn't that be worth learning how to access flow reliably and consistently? This is exactly what we train together at the Flow Research Collective. Just go to getmoreflow.com. We'll train you in the same protocols we teach to Navy SEALs and to executives in the boardrooms of Google and Facebook. What you'll learn is backed by research out of Harvard, DARPA, Deloitte, and others. Tapping this high level of productivity through flow and freeing up your time exponentially is a measurable outcome you can expect. It's time to get your time back. Just go to getmoreflow.com right now.

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