Retaining Physical Abilities Late in Life

It's hard to change a mindset. So let me just start with some facts. When the voice in your head says you're too old for this shit, remember the voice is lying. Forget about failing. Forget about like not even finishing. I would've died. It's only with the wisdom of 50 years of doing this stuff that I had the fortitude to live and win. And it's the total inverse of what sort of we've been taught, right? So having a negative mindset towards aging rots our memory. And it means that having this, these, your two old for this shit. We are literally hurting the elderly with our attitudes towards them, which is insane. Really truthfully, I think you got to go out and prove it to yourself. So to unlock the cognitive superpowers I talked about, those new levels of intelligence and the two halves of the brain working together and blah blah blah, 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 paradigm shifting. Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance. Access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present Present to you, Flow Research Collective Radio.

First of all, here's your book. Okay. So like all the Post-it notes, all the scribbles and, and, you know, clearly, I mean, what I appreciate about this book, Stephen, is it's very obvious you wrote it exactly for me.

Right. So I did.

I appreciate you writing my book. It's very, very nice of you. I very much appreciate the signed copy. Very, very sweet of you. And then you dedicate it to the trees, which I love, because who the fuck isn't a tree hugger? And then the first thing in the book, the first fucking thing in the book is a picture of, I assume, you smoking a doobie. Where's that? Is that Alpine Meadows? Please tell me that's Alpine Meadows.

It is either Alpine Meadows or Kirkwood.

Yeah, well, either answer is acceptable. Alpine's my home mountain, but I love Kirkwood.

Okay, so I was just at Alpine on Sunday.

How was it?

It was lit. It was great. It was really fun. We had a lot of fun.

Did you do some sidecountry action while you were there?

No, we, um, in fact, we, we pushed out. We were pushing out towards Mar Hakens, just hiking in, and, um, it was getting so sunny that the slush was getting so heavy. It got spooky. There was one— we had one run in there where I was like, okay, this is, this is an avalanche waiting to happen. We're not going any farther. So we went back to the terrain park.

Well, there's Avi. And then of course, in that thick, thick spring Sierra cement, you go to make a turn, you catch the inside edge and you blow out a knee really easily.

Yeah, it's a different kind of thing.

Now, Bean really wants to play with me and your book. I don't know if you can tell how excited he is about this conversation, but then at the front of the book, so you quote Borkowski To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art. Okay, so now I'm loving you even more. And then in the preface, you quote the Wikipedia entry about punk rock, and then you write a book about going mental skiing. So I really appreciate you writing my book. I enjoyed it very much. It was like, you and I are the same dude, except— and it's a big except— You're on, on the gnar gnar scale, you're like way higher than me. I'm, I'm, I'm on the suck it up buttercup scale, and you're on the let's go jump cliffs and see if we can, you know, mimic Shane McConkey in our—

my own way. Like, I knew Shane. I could never do the things Shane did. I can't even get into the neighborhood of the things Shane did. But yes, there is, there is an aspirational McConkey in all of it.

Yes, I, I, I get that. And so, A, I want A, thank you for writing my book. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And B, and I know you know I'm a huge fan, I'm a huge admirer, I respect you tremendously, and I say this with love, Steven, fuck you for writing this book.

You're welcome. And the reason I say that is— I appreciate you saying that. I know why you said it.

So why do you think I said it?

Because I throw down the gauntlet. Right? And the whole book is about don't be dead before you're dead. Yes.

I was getting used to being dead.

Yeah, I know.

I'm 55 now. Beginning really without much realization around 45, I started to stop trying to kill myself and have been easing into not killing myself ever since. And I thought I was just going to be able to smoke pot and sit in the garden and go for a nice walk and have a very nice you know, next part of my life. And now I read your fucking book and apparently I got to go surf Mavericks.

I am not saying you have to go surf Mavericks. I am saying that mission-style challenges in the second half of our life that are really hard are really good for us. Really good. Going out, doing something that you think is impossible for yourself and proving to yourself the second half of your life is filled with interesting possibilities. Um, is just— there's a, there's a big upside. But it's going to take this conversation someplace serious, so I'm not sure we want to go there yet.

No, no, no, I, I was being facetious. It's, it's great inspiration. It's a reminder. It's interesting, you know, um, my brother from another mother, Al Ramadan, and I have been circulating email amongst our friends. It's been, uh, obviously quite some time, pre-COVID, blah blah, since we went on a real adventure mission And normally he and I, a couple times a year, would take off and go to Indonesia surfing, or, you know, go to Europe skiing or scuba diving. Or, and generally we'd mostly a dude thing, although sometimes gals, you know, we brought our gals if they wanted to come, but a lot of dude adventure trips to all over the world, mostly skiing and surfing and scuba diving in our case. And as I'm reading, uh, as I'm reading Our Country, Al's circulate— and we had talked about this— Al circulates this email to the kind of broader group of us dudes and says, okay, next year's the year, we're going on a surf dive trip, and here are some choices, and kind of who's in and where would you like to go. And I'm literally sitting there reading this fucking book, and I'm like, well, the universe via Steven and Al is talking to me, it's time to go back to Nar Country. But now there's another thing I wanted to tell you about this book. The rules or laws at the end. Genius. Because the aha here, and you give it to us, is you give us the stories, what we in Snow Leopard call some of the non-obvious. You take us on a magical mystery tour of your diary of today we're at Kirkwood and today we're at Mammoth and today we're at wherever we are. And then in the end, you synthesize all of it down into a set of instructional learnings. And so I think you've done something that a lot of authors fail to do, and certainly I have failed to do at points with my writing and our writing, which is take you on a magical mystery tour that's fun, but then explain to you what you want us to get out of the magical mystery tour.

Interesting point. So big picture, right? Now, Our Country's a Book About Peak Performance Aging. And essentially, or it's got all the skiing in it because I tried to teach myself how to park ski in my 50s because there are about 11 different biological reasons why it's supposed to be impossible to learn to park ski once you're over 35. Now, there's a whole bunch of science that's been done in the past 20 years.

I thought it was once you were over 10.

Depends who you are. But there's a whole bunch of science that's been done in the past 20, 25 years that says, hey, wait a minute, you know, the traditional ideas about aging, what I like to call it, what the long slow rot theory, right? The idea that all of our mental skills and our physical skills decline over time and there's nothing we can do to stop the slide, which is the standard view of aging. I think most of us grew up with, I think most people still believe some version of that and it turns out it's not true at all, right? All of what we know is that all the stuff we used to think we lost, we now know it's a use it or lose it skill. So if you keep training it and stuff, you get to hang onto it. Advance far later in life than anybody thought possible.

And as a way to sort of prove that out and test that, I tried to teach myself how to park ski in my 50s, which, you know, by the way, when you start the book, and I didn't know that, I just started reading the book, and, you know, you get to that pretty quickly, right? And I'm like, you know, I've skied most of my life, and, you know, I do some of these things that you like to do as well. I'm like, are you out of your fucking mind? I remember being in my early 40s at Northstar, uh, gonna meet some friends, skiing on the front side where the park is. What's the name of that lift that's underneath the park at Northstar?

Uh, yeah, the one on the left.

It's like, yeah, it's like a Six Pack or something on the left.

Anyway, yeah, it's a Six Pack, that one.

So I decide to go in the park, it's early morning, and I, I go, I head to the pipe and I just do a hop off the side of the pipe, maybe half or at most two-thirds of the way up the pipe. So I'm not in the pipe dropping in, I'm hopping off the edge of the pipe at the front end of it, and it's real icy, and bam, broken humerus. So I'm reading this book going, Stephen is—

Pipes are no joke.

Stephen is—

Pipes are no joke.

This guy in his fucking 50s, park skiing, jumping on rails and shit.

So a couple things that are worth pointing out. One, those rules at the end, right, are essentially a whole bunch of scientific ideas that we just— we at the Flow Research Collective, my organization where we study the neurobiology of peak performance, took and turned into a protocol, right? A learning protocol that we thought is— it took all these ideas and thought would really allow older adults to progress at sort of difficult you know, physical activities like, like park skiing. And, um, the book is one version of the experiment I ran with my ski partner. Um, but then, you know, when it was all said and done, we also took 17 older adults, ages like 29 to 68, and ran this, put them through the same protocol in 4 days on the mountain. These, these were intermediate snowboarders and skiers. We got them versed up in terrain park skiing, and, and they started to make significant progress. It was a set of ideas that works for everyone, which is the thing that I want to emphasize here because it'll get lost in our conversation. But to your point, it's why it was such a great test case, because everybody has that reaction to— if you've been on a snowboarder's skis and you've been on a mountain and seen a terrain park, you know that like allure of like, oh my God, what is that? That looks amazing. And oh my God, I'm going to die in like, what, I can't go there, right? It's very palatable. So I thought it was a great test case for all this. And I also, I had unfinished business as a skier, you know what I mean? Like, I had extra motivation. There was a lot. I spent a bunch of time in there. And I mean, the reason I opened the book with that definition of punk is it's sort of like a punk rock approach to aging, right? Like, it's a gritty, DIY creative approach to kind of peak performance aging. And the rules which are at the back of that was sort of my attempt to distill that out in a way that people could find useful. In a way, what I always tell people about this book that's different from a lot of my other books, in fact all my other books, is it's really a book about applied peak performance. Most of my other books are about the science of peak performance or stories about the sci— but like, the how-to, how do you apply this shit on a day-to-day basis? And here it's being applied to the challenges of peak performance aging. But that's the only way to do that. And I realize nobody's ever done it in literature because you sort of have to do what I did, which is you have to do a diary where you walk people through, this is what we did today, this is what we did today, this is what we did today. And man, it's hard to do that as a creative and not make it freaking boring as hell, right? Like, One of the reasons nobody's ever done it is because like it would be really fricking boring. I say that like you can't tell, this is my 14th book and it took like 14 books of work to figure out how to do this kind of book. You know what I mean? In a way that doesn't bore the shit out of the readers and is useful to everybody, especially not just skiers. So those were really like weird, creative, hard writing challenges that took a while to sort of solve. And I hope I did it because it really, if I did my job, it really gives you a look sort of under the hood of, oh wow, this is what it looks like on a day-to-day basis. And the reason that was so important to me, and then I'll shut up and quit blabbing, is you're, you're here to not shut up.

That's why I wanted to do this with you. I want you to never shut up.

My company's big, right? We train people. We're the largest peak performance training company in the world. We work in 130 countries. We're training tens of thousands of people. Every day or every month. And one of the most common problems, like, it doesn't matter what country we're in, where we are, we're training young, old, C-suite executive, soccer mom, is they want to know what it looks like, right? I say things like, hey, peak performance works like compound interest. It's a little bit today, it's a little bit tomorrow, and then it really starts to grow. If you've not done the work and you don't know what the hell I'm talking about, right? That's a really— you got to take that on faith upfront. And it's the big promise. That's hard to do, and it's hard to explain to people what it looks like on a daily basis, even though we coach and train tons of people. And so, when I was thinking about writing this book, one of the challenges that we just wanted to solve as a company for our clients or the people we get to work with is what does this shit look like on a day-to-day basis? What does it look like when you apply it on a day basis? So hopefully that's what's distilled in the rules and that's what we get out of the book. Okay, I just blabbed for a while. Let me shut up and kick it back over to you and the cat.

I never want you to shut up.

I want to see what the cat's going to do next. It's really not about you, man. I'm sorry.

He's going to want to play fetch any minute now. He's got this—

That's all right.

He's got this fishy toy in here that gets him very excited to play fetch with.

I'm pretty sure when, like, you kill the video, the cat just grabs one of the guitars off the wall and starts playing Slipknot. Exactly.

So, so much in here. So I think the premise is incredible because the premise, you know, one of the things in category design we teach people is reject the premise. And you may end up accepting the premise in the end or accepting part of the premise in the end. But most people don't realize if you want to create a different future, if you accept the premise of the present and the past, the likelihood the future is a continuation of the past is really high. If you reject the premise of the present and the past, you can open yourself up to something radically different. And so just the notion of reject the premise of, you know, you hit some age, 40, 50, 60, and you begin to decline is bullshit. And my friend group would suggest that. I've read a lot of research that would suggest that that's bullshit. And so just starting there to challenge people to say, hey, wait a minute, Uh, slow physical decline is not only not the way it needs to be, it could be a whole different way.

Let me take it one step further because this is one of the, the sort of like the, the wild mind-blowing things about the, about peak. This is true across the boards in peak performance, um, and even mental health. Like, get out of peak performance, just like general mental health, it becomes more true in peak performance. But in peak performance aging, it's the, it's wild. So you talk about the mind-body connection. But when you, you start, where it gets really weird is when you start talking about what the data shows us, overwhelming amounts of data, 50 years worth of data, really long-term studies done everywhere about mindset and aging, for example. So the thing, like, listening to you talk, I, what I was reminded of is if we don't do this work right, if we don't have a positive mindset towards aging, The penalty is considerable, and if we do, the benefit is considerable. So this is crazy, and this is work. It got started by Ellen Langer in the '70s and '80s at Harvard. It's been carried on. Becca Levy at Yale is carrying this work on today. So there's massive amounts of data. But if you have a positive mindset towards aging, literally my best days are ahead of me. Second half of my life is filled with like overwhelming exciting possibility. The translation, this is very clear, is an additional 8 years of healthy longevity. It's the single most important thing you can do. Let me put it to you differently. You are morbidly obese and you've got a crappy mindset towards aging. Which do you think you should change first? Which is the more important thing to change? You will live longer and healthier if you change your mindset rather than lose weight. The same is true for quitting smoking. Changing your mindset is more important than quitting smoking, even if you're a chain smoker. It's that powerful.

Somebody needs to bring me a whiskey and a pre-roll right now.

Seriously, seriously, brother, I'm with you. Let me tell you the flip side because this is Becca Levy's work. She was working on— she's worked on stereotypes around aging. And so ageism is literally the most socially acceptable prejudice in the world. It's wild. Because like, you know, these days I walk outside of my house with any prejudice and before I get to my mailbox, I'm canceled. And yet I can look at you and I can be like, on air, be like, dude, you're too old for this shit. And we're all going to laugh. We're going to think it's funny, right? It's totally acceptable. It's everywhere.

And yet nobody ever says, hey, hey, Stephen, you're too white for this shit.

Right. Or you're too male for this shit.

Or you're too straight for this shit.

Or you're too cisgender for this shit. It's true. It's true. I'm going to park all the jokes that are currently running through my mind that could come off of everything you just said, just so I don't get canceled. That said, what I do want to say, Becca Levy discovered that is that if we, uh, if we're exposed to negative stereotypes around aging in like our 30s and our 40s, and we start to internalize them, or we have a shitty mindset towards aging, by the time we get to 60, so you're not even sort of into later life, you're at the second half of your life, you're really at the threshold. By the time you're at 60, you will exhibit 30% greater memory decline. It's wild. So having a negative mindset towards aging rots our memory. And it means that having like these, you're too old for this shit. We are literally like hurting the elderly and not even the elderly, you know, the middle-aged and the elderly with our attitudes towards that, which is insane. It's so, yeah. Uh, there's a lot there.

It's so interesting you say that because, um, I've noticed and it's been said by many that, um, the great quote is never let an old person enter your body. And it's easy as we get a little older to say things like, "Oh, well, you know, not bad for a guy my age," or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I have refused to add those modifiers to my language because I don't want to self-condition myself that that's the case. Now, a question I have for you. I have noticed, and this is true for some of the older people in my life, I have some people who are very far along in their life, and in some cases, Stephen, they get very fucking grumpy. The sort of analogy of the grumpy old man or the grumpy old woman, that metaphor or that trope is there for a reason. And so I'm curious, is there a connection between the unlock of NAR Country and people getting grumpy as they get older in your mind?

No, I would say the opposite. And it's a tricky one. So let me tell you what we know, because certainly that stereotype exists. It actually, most of it probably is about a failure to take advantage of what's afforded us in the second half of our life. Let me lean into that a little bit. So what we know is that over time, so adult development is not automatic. We have to do the hard teenage development, right? Like human development in childhood and teenage years, it happens automatically. You're going to go through your terrible twos whether or not you like it or not, right? Like, it's just going to happen. You're going to be a teenager and your hormones are going to— it's going to happen no matter what. In adulthood, once we get into our 20s, it's not automatic. There are if-then conditions. There are ways you have to proceed and things you have to do along the way. If you get it right, what happens is, as we move into our 50s, really amazing things happen. We get it right. We gain access to whole new levels of intelligence, creativity, empathy, and wisdom. So empathy and wisdom are very counter to the grumpy old man or grumpy old woman. And we also know that one of the things that's very cool about the brain is the brain actually becomes more optimistic over time. So a lot of people reach levels of happiness and contentment and fulfillment over 50, 60, and 70 that are just unavailable beforehand. Because of how the brain is wired and how the brain changes over time. So this is one of the things that we've started to learn recently, is that it's not just all bad. There are actually these positive changes that take place in the brain, and a lot of it is a result of the two halves of the brain start working better together. They're sort of in opposition to each other for most of our lives. It's not really exactly true, but they work that way a lot, and they start cooperating much better over 50. And so this unlocks all this new stuff. So the research shows that if you're grumpy, right, it's because you're not doing the adult development work. So what's the adult development work? What are those gateways? What are the moderators? This is work that's come from a bunch. I've done a little bit of this. Some of this is work that we did at the Flow Research Collective. A lot of it is work that came out of the Harvard Adult Development Projects, which were these 100-year studies of adult developments. And a lot of it came out of work done by my, one of my great mentors, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow psychology. And flow, which is one of the reasons I work so much on adult development and peak performance aging, is because flow is one of the big drivers of adult development. It's, and we can talk about more about why that is and plays a huge role in peak performance aging. So all this stuff is sort of in the middle of my field, but sort of all that besides the point. Let's talk about what is important. So by age 30, we have to really successfully grow up. Essentially, we have to pass through the gateway of identity. This is— Erikson pointed this out years ago. He just got the numbers wrong. He said we have to solve this by 18, and it turns out we actually have to solve it by 30. But you got to sort of know who you are in the world. What are your values? What are your strengths? Where do you lie morally? How do you want to live in the world by age 30? By 40, we have to have what economists call match fit. You want to be able to live with regular access to flow, to live with passion and purpose and meaning, or you want a tight alignment between what you do and who you are. So one of the reasons why knowing who you are at 30 is so important is because by 40, you have to have an alignment between who you are and how you make your living in the world, right? It's not really how you make your living. Either it's your vocation or your avocation. It's how you spend the bulk of your time by 50. And this is where I think the grumpy old men and women, this is where they get it wrong. So by 50, the gateway is really interesting. You have to forgive those who have done you wrong, and you have to forgive yourself. And if you can't do that, you can't unlock the empathy and the wisdom. And I think some of the optimism that actually comes your way naturally. So if you ask me what went wrong, That's, I think, a lot of what it is. And then the other second half of it, you have to do things in your 50s and beyond to sort of maintain. And there's really 3 things in your 50s to unlock the cognitive superpowers I talked about, those new levels of intelligence and the 2 halves of the brain working together and blah, blah, blah. You need to engage in creative activities. It's the creative thinking style that really starts to train the brain up in this. And then once you've done that, you have to regularly practice train down risk aversion. And this is the other grumpy old man and old woman is we will normally get more risk averse over time for a bunch of different biological reasons. And you need to fight back against it on a train risk, social risk, intellectual risk, creative risk, all these things. We have to be training them on an almost daily basis over time. Otherwise, we start to get risk averse, which means we start to get conservative. We dislike change, and that tends to produce some of the grumpiness. So, um, there's stuff to do every step of the way to sort of fight against that. But I would tell you that, that that's through like a little bit of peak performance gone wrong. Like you're not taking advantage of, of what your biology actually makes possible.

It is interesting, as we age, there are— well, we can talk about mental things, but there are physical things, um, that are different, that are valuable.

So it's interesting on the physical side because, um, it's a lot of work, right? We now, we now know that, you know, as I said, all the skills we used to think declined, they're use it or lose it skills. And if you never stop training them, you get to hang on to them, even advance them far later in life than you thought possible. I'll give you a simple example on the physical side. So VO2 max, which is the upper threshold aerobic capacity, right? Like if you're bump skiing or you're sprinting or, you know, hip-hop dancing or something, it's in a slam pit, something. And all those examples would require VO2 max. We used to believe, we the scientific community used to believe it didn't even matter what advancements you made in peak performance aging because somebody sooner or later, somebody's gonna punch you in the face with VO2 max. 'Cause it starts dropping in your 20s and the general feeling is it like falls off a cliff after 50 and by 80 you're totally screwed, right? And then they started noticing this weird thing started happening in ultra running. Where men and women in their 70s and 80s started outperforming people in their 50s and 60s. And that was weird. And for like, in like 100-mile races or 150-mile races, like these crazy grueling races, and suddenly like people who really should not be doing well were doing better than younger folks. And they tried to figure out what was going on and they took another look at VO2 max of like, uh, triathletes in their 80s. So octogenarian triathletes, they looked at VO2 max and they figured out those who had started regularly training VO2 max, meaning you pushed on your upper respiratory capacity a couple times a week starting in your 50s, by the time they got to their 80s, they hit the VO2 max of healthy 35-year-olds. In fact, the world record holder is a dude, I think he's 88 and he is got the VO2 max of a 25-year-old. And so this is just one example and it's weird stuff. Strength, I'll give you another example. So muscle fibers decline over time. Right? You're gonna— if you get to your 80s, 30% of your muscle fibers will have atrophied. And that sounds like a freaking death sentence, except it turns out the fibers that remain sort of learn how to do double duty. And, and we gain wisdom, so we get better at doing these skill things on top of it over time. And the remaining— so it's, it's like you end up, yeah, we're going to lose some strength, right? We are. But it's like 10 to 15% of what's possible, not 30% or 40% or 50% of the other things that people say. So if you look at like the meta-analyses on this, they'll say things like the performance of masters and elite level athletes is remarkable. Like, you see these things in people's 60s, 70s, and 80s that don't even make sense. That, you know, you go back 25, 30 years ago, we were seeing this in people in their 40s and 50s and 60s, and we're now seeing it up in their 80s. And by the way, it's probably happening in our 90s, but nobody's looked. They're like the, the most of the data sort of ends at our 80s. 'Cause a lot of the, the young and vigorous people are gonna be doing this stuff. They're not there yet, or we just haven't done the work. So it probably extends out longer, but that's what we've actually just done the work on.

Amazing. And we've seen it. And if you push yourself, you can experience it. You know, there are a handful of things that I started a little bit later in life. Probably the two most noteworthy are surfing. I started to surf in my 40s, and I'd always loved fighting and done some, but I'd never really taken it very seriously. And I started to train martial arts and boxing seriously in my mid-40s. And it's amazing, you take any of those things, and the first time you paddle out on a surfboard, you fall off the surfboard because you can't even stay on the fucking surfboard, never mind catch a wave. And the first time anybody walks into a dojo, they don't know what they're doing. They don't even know how to make a fist properly. And then in the near and now term, it can feel very frustrating, like we're not making very much progress. But then in 6 or 8 months, all of a sudden we're surfing hip to shoulder high waves competently. Or we're now doing 20-strike combinations and we're starting to do some sparring and so forth and so on. And it's so in the DNA of what you're writing. It's an incredible thing to experience oneself achieving a thing, particularly a physical thing, although it happens with a mental thing as well. That heretofore you didn't think possible. And in the moment you're doing it, it's almost like you have a bit of an out-of-body experience. It's like, oh fuck, I'm on this wave that I have no business being on. Well, fuck, I guess I know what I'm doing. Or you're sparring with a semi-pro fighter and you're holding your own and you're doing well, or you're doing whatever it is, and you're like, I can't And you sort of amaze yourself and you capture it beautifully. And the thing that's interesting that you blow apart is somehow, and I hadn't thought about this for myself, Stephen, we get trained unconsciously that those are things you experience younger and earlier in life and that you experience those sort of holy shit, I can't believe I did that experiences. Much less as we age. And what your book says is that's complete and total bullshit.

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, 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, 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 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 go to getmoreflow.com. That's getmoreflow.com. All the best.

It does in a lot of different ways. So let me just start with some facts because, you know, I make the point towards the end of the book that when, you know, about action sports, when the voice in your head says you're too old for this shit, remember the voice is lying. And it's when you understand So peak performance aging in a sentence is you want to regularly engage in challenging, creative, and social activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. That's peak performance aging in a sentence. And dynamic, it's just this catch-all term for it requires strength, stamina, flexibility, agility, and balance, right? Those 5 things, if you got 'em all at once, it's dynamic. So one, that's a very good recipe for flow. Over time and increasing the amount of flow in your life. But it is action sports. Action sports are challenging, creative, and social activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments to a tee. So these sports that we were literally like the voice in our head, society tells us, no, no, you're too old for this shit. It turns out they're phenomenal for longevity. And here's the best proof in the world. What are the 3 longest-lived communities in America? Summit County, Eagle County, and Pitkin County, Colorado. That's Vail, Aspen, Beaver Creek, A-Basin, Copper Mountain. I can keep going. Or it's the I-70 corridor, basically. And these are meccas for outdoor and action sport athletes. And on average, in those communities, people live 10 years longer than they do the rest of America. And that's the— those are the advantages, part of the advantages in action sports, um, which is, is really kind of wild. It's— I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's really counterintuitive. But you also lit on this— you also said something that I really want to emphasize because we started out talking about a while, a little while back, about mindset, the importance of mindset. And it's hard to change a mindset. There's some established ways. You got to watch your language, how you talk to yourself. Mindfulness. If you're a regular mindfulness practice, that can be really good and helpful for mindset. But really truthfully, I think you got to go out and prove it to yourself. It doesn't matter what you read in a book or what you do with to tune your language or all that. You have to prove it to yourself. And the way to do it is we train people now to list Pick a gnar style mission. For me, it was I wanted to learn how to park ski, right? But it's for you, it's whatever you think is impossible for you. It was fighting and then surfing, right? Like, those are great gnar style missions. And getting on a mission that will prove to yourself, literally, like I always said, like whatever I thought was possible the second half of my life, when I learned how to do a nose butter 360, I was like, it was out the window. Like the whole future was just exploded because I was like, there was no version of my future that included nose butter 360. And there I was. And you know what? And it turns out it wasn't even that hard to learn, which was even wilder. But very hard to perfect. I will say learning was easy, perfecting totally different scenario. But I think there's something to these gnar style missions that are very, very foundational to kind of peak performance aging. So I'm a huge fan of them and I'm also a huge fan of like constantly reminding the voice in my head that's saying you're too old for this shit, that the voice is lying. I call it getting geezered. When somebody gets their I'm too old for this shit juice all over you, we call it getting geezered. I'll tell you one quick story about getting geezered because this is the best story that's not in our country. It's not a story about me. It's a story about my friend Rebecca Rusht, who is one of the greatest action sport athletes of all time. They call her the Queen of Pain. 8-time world champion mountain biker, adventure racer. Um, she's got, uh, she's got like world championships and things you didn't even know were sports— orienteering, things like, like literally you're like, what hasn't she done? So last year she won the human-powered Iditarod. So there's an Iditarod where you don't have sled dogs, you go on bikes in the middle of winter across Alaska by yourself. And Rebecca is 53, and she won. And all the newspapers made the story her age— Rebecca Rush wins I Did a Rod despite being 53 years old. Despite being 53 years old. And she calls me up afterwards, and we're talking about this, like, getting geezered thing. She was like, oh my God, I kept getting geezered by these people. And, and I was— she's like, and she's like, what they don't get is The only reason I won that race, the only reason I lived is because I was 53. If I would've done this at 45, I would've died. Forget about failing. Forget about not even finishing. I would've died. It's only with the wisdom of 50 years of doing this stuff that I had the fortitude to live and win. And it's the total inverse of what sort of we've been taught, right?

It's so true. And that wisdom thing is very, very powerful. You know, I grew up in an industry, the tech industry, where by 45, unless you're a senior executive, you're kind of done. And by 55, being a mid-level something at a tech company is sort of not good. And you're not going to be respected, and you're going to kind of be over here. And what I've realized over time is, at least for me, everything I needed to learn about having a career was in the original Star Wars, which is if you're a high potential young person who's really stretching and going for it, hire Boba Fett to kill anybody in your way.

No, that's not it.

Well, that might be one path. That's not the one I'm on.

Sorry. I'm sorry. Okay. I was just curious.

Anyway, if you're lucky, you're a Leia or a Luke. And if you're a great Leia or a Luke, you get to blow up the Death Star and beat the bad guys. And if you do enough of that over time, you develop a reputation and a level of respect because of what you've accomplished and who you are, et cetera. And the world acknowledges you as an Obi-Wan. And if you become Obi-Wan, your job is to continue to progress yourself, of course, as well as to make more Leias and Lukes. And if you're successful as Obi-Wan, you get to become a Yoda. And for some reason, that analogy and the other one I'm going to share with you— do you remember who Wayne Dyer was by any chance, Stephen?

Sure.

And so I remember shortly before his death listening to him talk about aging. And how much he said, I loved having a 17-year-old body and a 27, 37, and now an 87-year-old body, and how life evolves. And we're not a human being having a spiritual experience, we're a spiritual being having a human experience. And he was talking about essentially embracing kind of where he was in life along the way. And for some reason, we've all decided in our culture to teach ourselves that once you hit this certain age, you're going to decline and that you can't learn these new things and you can't get into a physical flow state on a regular basis, never mind a mental flow state on a regular basis.

There's so much here to unpack in so many different directions to go. One thing, let me just start with the last thing you said, which is flow. So Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, godfather of flow psychology, who passed away a couple of years ago, RIP. The last study he did before he died was on this very question. He wanted to know, so if flow proneness, our desire to get into flow and our ability to get into flow declines over time or not. And if he found out that it doesn't, It's only at the very tail end of our life if our body is like when they totally fall apart. If you can no longer physically get into flow, you can get blocked there. But I will— so the second thing I'll tell you is if you want to stay off cognitive decline and never get Alzheimer's and dementia, you have to build up what's known as a cognitive reserve. Cognitive reserve is basically how do you make the brain neuroprotective against decline? And there are two 2 main ways. Expertise and wisdom literally are the 2 that— why they talk about lifelong learning, lifelong learning being so important. What they're really saying is the more expertise and wisdom we accumulate, the longer you can stave off cognitive decline. And the reason is this: most decline takes place in the prefrontal cortex part of your brain. That's right back here. It's the newest part of the brain from an evolutionary perspective. Most powerful part of the brain. It's also one of the most susceptible to Alzheimer's and dementia. So when we learn new skills, right, expertise is like the skills themselves, and wisdom is like all the kind of emotional intelligence skills that surround it, right? Like, I'm learning how to park ski, but I'm also learning how to keep my emotions in check in the face of dire physical consequences. So that's wisdom, the emotions in check, whereas the nose butter 360 is actual skills expertise. Both of those things make really diffuse and robust networks across the prefrontal cortex. You get new neurons, neurogenesis, you get synaptic plasticity, new networks. And the brain is really redundant automatically. We don't just ever figure out one way to do things. We figure out like 3 or 4 or 5 different ways. That's just how the brain sort of works naturally. So expertise and wisdom. When people talk about lifelong learning is really important, expertise and wisdom. So Two things are important here. Flow is literally proof of mastery. When we get into flow, because flow only shows up when we're pushing on our skills, we're using our skills to the utmost, we grow, we're more adaptive on the other side of a flow state, and wisdom and empathy increase. So, it's like the engine of adult development and it's the engine of mastery. So, one, how do you know you're getting peak performance aging? Right? How do you know? You're defending against Alzheimer's and dementia and that sort of stuff, lots of flow states and your desire for flow doesn't decline over time. So that's the sort of flow portion of this. But work by a guy named Yakov Stern who did a lot of the early work on cognitive reserve. He's at Columbia, is a brilliant guy. And this is off of your— I learned how to fight, I learned how to surf. So this is some part I'm bringing it all back circle to what you said. He discovered that for every additional leisure activity, quote unquote, we onboard sort of like over 40 or over 30, we get an additional 8% cognitive reserve and it's cumulative. So, and he was measuring things like, you know, doing complicated like crossword puzzles or engaging in like really smart discussions with your friends or learning a new skill. So, I've been teaching myself how to draw and I've also been teaching myself the piano on top of teaching myself how to park ski. So, I've got a bunch of different activities and for this very reason.

So, the interesting thing about all of this is it's something in martial arts that often gets referred to as the beginner's mind. And so taking on these new things forces the beginner's mind. It also, and you hear this, we hear this in martial arts, and I hear this in a lot of spiritual circles, it forces us to humble ourselves. Because if you think about park skiing, well, you will either be humble in your park skiing or you will be humbled by park skiing. And that's true of almost any new thing that we're trying to develop, trying to learn how to write, trying to learn how to paint, trying to learn how to draw. Well, you're going to look stupid trying to learn how to do yoga. Well, if you've never done downward facing dog, you're going to look like you're in downward facing donkey. And so there's a vulnerability, there's a willingness to look stupid, to fall off the surfboard, to look like a donkey. To all of those things and to put yourself in these uncomfortable situations that are both mentally and physically uncomfortable. They could be threatening— park skiing or big wave surfing or sparring with somebody. But there's also this fear of looking stupid, particularly as an older person who, if you've achieved any success in life in the things that you normally do, you probably look the opposite of stupid. And so I'm curious about how this sort of beginner's mind, uh, humbling oneself, uh, starting fresh in a complete new domain where you're not the expert, particularly if you're an older person who's achieved some success in a domain where you are the expert. How do all these things feather into your thinking and research, Stephen?

So, wow, there's like 6 different answers you ask. You ask, would you ask something easy? Jesus, get the cat back.

Hey, I thought you were the smart guy. I'm trying to pretend I'm smart to come up to your level.

All right, fair, fair enough. Um, down to my level, you mean. But so let's start with the self-consciousness stuff, the shame, the embarrassment, that sort of stuff. There's two things I want to talk about here. One, 3 things I want to talk about here. One, you really want to guard against all that stuff because it will block flow. So one of the things that happens in flow is the prefrontal cortex quiets down, right? So when you drop into flow and the voice in your head gets really quiet and self-consciousness tends to disappear, all that sort of stuff that happens because the prefrontal cortex starts to turn off when we are egotistical in any way, when we are embarrassed, when we're self-conscious, it hyperactivates the prefrontal cortex, so block flow. So you really want to guard against this stuff. So how do you guard against it? And as you said, it does tend to increase a little bit as you get older. So to me, there's 3, there's 3 things I'm looking at. Thing 1, remember I gave you that sentence about peak performance aging in a single sentence, and one of it, part of it was you want to regularly engage in dynamic activities. That was all 5 physical categories that demand a deliberate play approach. So what is deliberate play and why do you want to do this? So we talked about the importance of lifelong learning, and if you want to learn, the standard trope around learning is the best way to learn is what Anders Ericsson called deliberate practice. So this is everything from early specialization in schools to 10,000 hours to master Malcolm Gladwell, all that stuff, right? And it turns out that, and Anders himself passed away recently, he was a great man. He was a really cool, nice guy. He would've told you this too. He says, look, deliberate practice is great for certain kinds of skills, mathematics, violin. There are certain things where it works really, really well. But as a general rule, what we learned from learning theory is that deliberate play always outperforms deliberate practice. What is deliberate play? Deliberate practice is I did the exact same thing I did before, just a little bit better. Deliberate play is I did the thing I did before and I'm improving on top of it in some creative way. And it turns out that deliberate play is much better for learning than deliberate practice for a bunch of different reasons. One, self-consciousness, shame, embarrassment, all that shit stays turned off so that better chance of getting into flow. Flow, among its many attributes, amplifies learning, right? Studies done by the US Defense Department, soldiers in flow learn 240% to 500% faster than normal. So that's huge, right? So you get more flow amplified learning without the shame and the self-consciousness. Also, with deliberate practice, there's one right answer. I did the thing I did before just a little better. And if you don't get that right answer, you don't get any new dopamine and no motivation, right? You did something wrong and now you feel shitty about your performance. With deliberate play, there's only one wrong answer. I did the same thing I did last time. Everything else is a right answer and an opportunity to learn and grow and change. Right. And it doesn't matter. Did I fail? Did I succeed? There's no such thing because you're just learning and growing. And it turns out when we play, so how does learning and memory work? Quick shorthand is the more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, the better chance it moves from short-term holding into long-term storage. It's one of the things neurochemicals do is they tag experiences as like important, save for later. This is especially true of reward neurochemistry, like dopamine and endorphins.

So the more fun we have, the more we learn. Is that what you're telling me?

Basically that. Basically. Or the more powerful the emotion is. So like very, very sad emotions, very, very scary emotions, very, very joyous. Those are things we tend to remember. And flow above all. Because we like flow better than most other experiences. But it's neurochemical. When we do deliberate practice, I said earlier, if you get it totally right, you'll get a little bit of dopamine. That's your, oh, I did it right. I got a little dopamine. With deliberate play, you get the dopamine, sure, but you also get endorphins. And those two chemicals together, it's why play is so pleasurable and so joyous. A lot of it has to do with the endorphins, but it cements things into memory faster. So you asked this really sort of complicated question about like learning and shame and self-consciousness. They're actually all really tied together. And it just, one of the things that we did, I said we took a very unusual approach to park skiing. Part of it was very, very playful for this sort of very reason. And it worked really, really well to everybody's advantage.

It's so interesting as you're talking, I'm reminded of something I read from Jack White from the White Stripes years ago. If you remember, there was two of them in the band, him and his sister, girlfriend, wife, who knows what they were.

Who knows? I thought it was his sister.

Who gives a shit? I love the mystery. It's like, we don't need to know everything. Anyway, one of the things he said was he thought the band decreased in its creativity and songwriting and performance as he and Meg became competent in their instruments. Because once you know how to play guitar or drums, in their case, then you know what you should do, as opposed to when you don't know, you just get together and bang on shit and make a noise until you think you made a good noise.

That was sort of So one, I said, I was telling you about our approach to park skiing and the core of our approach was a couple of really simple ideas. The first was go 1 inch at a time. So we took park skiing, this really complicated thing, we broke it into 8 foundational skills that anybody who's ever been on skis or snowboard could do. Flashing, grinding, a 180, 360, And this could be like sliding on the surface of the snow, jumping, crouching. These are all fundamental skills. And we knew, for example, like anybody who can do a hockey stop, right? Which is kick your skis or your snowboard sideways and grind across the snow to stop. Anybody who got made it out of advanced beginner, it was advanced beginner, learned how to do a hockey stop, a grind. If I change the level of, if you, if I go from flat ground to 10-degree snow coping, right? Now it's a hockey stop is a grind, or if you flip your hips the other way, it's a slash. So I knew everybody had a place to start. They had this skill that they could do 100% of the time with zero conscious interference and not much fear and get it right. And it was built on that in a playful fashion, right? One inch at a time. And we didn't teach people how to jump We taught them how to creatively interpret the terrain park because it's more playful, it's more fun, it's more flowy. And people don't realize they see this giant, like, 80-foot jump and they're like, oh my God, I can't do anything with that. Well, sure you can. You can throw a grind on the side of the jump because almost anybody can do that. And there's a way to stage into that, blah, blah. So we taught people how to use their bodies in new ways and be creative. Rather than try to like ramp it up in some big way. But it was all this play-based approach and it really worked.

Amen. Hallelujah. Now there's in the rules and in the book, it's Rule 10: Train like a pro, recover like a pro. Here you say, quote, we can retain 70% of our physical abilities even very late in life. That's a shocking statement, Stephen.

Yeah, that's John Faulkner. Actually, I'm quoting John Faulkner who's at the University of Michigan. He's a physiologist who was looking at all these different use-it-or-lose-it skills. So, yeah, it's kind of amazing. And cognitively too, we really have figured out how to train stuff that we thought I'll give you processing speed. So processing speed decreases over time for a lot of different reasons, including like the brain shrinks over time and then like it literally shrinks. And as white matter declines, white matter is the insulation, right? The axons, the nerves that run between brains, they have insulation and it allows the signals to move faster. And that decreases over time. And process experience— it turns out there are video games now that can literally train back process and speed, made by my colleague Adam Ghazali in neuroscience at University of California, San Francisco. Go to like the company Neuroscape is his company, and they've got all kinds of different video games that are approved by the FDA, prescribable by doctors. Like, they work like medicines, and they can train up a lot of these cognitions. So it's not just it's the mental side, it's the physical side. And we're really like, this is sort of like what happened in positive psychology, right? We spent most of the 20th century figuring out what's broken, right? This was psychology. Psychology spent the 20th century figuring out, okay, you're really depressed, you're really broken. Let's get you back to normal. This is the job of psychology. And suddenly in the late '90s, psychology started going, hey, wait a minute, No, no, no. We should explore the upper possibility of human potential. It's not just about fixing the broken. It's about helping the average get up to superhuman. Right? What does that take? That's sort of what happened with aging, right? We spent most of the 20th century figuring out how we're going to rot. And then we've spent the 21st century going, oh, all this stuff we can fix. Here's what we need to be doing. And so it's really cool. And it's It's really exciting. And I think we're really at the front end of this work. But the last thing— I know we're running out of time, but the last thing I'm not running out of time because this is a fucking podcast. We can go for 12 hours. I'm gonna run out of time.

Fair enough.

But the thing I want to mention, because most people hear about peak performance aging, they think two things. They think, I'm not old enough, this stuff doesn't apply to me. And one, What we know, what the research is very clear on is that peak performance aging is a series of skills and the work actually starts in your 20s, right? You can start at any time. You could be a sedentary 90-year-old and start then and you're going to make a difference. But if you really— the biggest dent, there's work in your 20s, there's work in your 30s, there's work in your 40s. It's like there's something, there's always something to be doing. In fact, the cognitive reserve stuff, like learning those other hobbies, Jakob Stern himself said, look, best example, if you want to fight off cognitive decline, start young. Never stop learning. Keep all the time. Never stop learning these skills. Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. So that's A. B, the thing I want to mention is people hear peak performance aging or anti-aging, all this other stuff, and they automatically think substances, pharmacology, diets, things like ice baths, right? New— go, go vegan, go, you know, take your pick. And, you know, got to inject this, got to take these meds. And I'm not saying those things aren't real and don't work. They are real and they do work. But you're looking at the cutting edge of anti-aging medicine. It's just being developed right now. And whether that shit works or not, we're not going to know for another 20 years. But there's 60 years of research that's extremely well validated that said the biggest interventions are these psychological interventions that produce neurobiological changes, a vigorous, active social life, regularly engaging in challenging and creative activities, right? That demand dynamic delivery. These are the big levers. And the crazy thing about it is the reason you're not hearing them celebrated is nobody owns them. Nobody's ever going to make a dime off you regularly engaging in dynamic, deliberate play in novel outdoor environments. That's not a medicine. It's not a pharmacology. Nobody's making billions of dollars off of it. And yet there's 60 years of data that says, oh my God, you want to live a long, super healthy, super productive, super virile, rock till you drop kind of life. These are the big things. This is the big deal. So, um, I, and I, and I think those are, those are both really cool points that are worth knowing about.

Stephen, I fucking love you, man. You're so great, you know.

And, uh, sir, it's a pleasure hanging with you.

I think I've told you this in the past. I, I can't remember what magazine, maybe it was Outside Magazine or something like that, when Rise of Superman came out. And I think it was a review I must have read. Anyway, I, I read something about Rise of Superman so many years ago, just as it was coming out. And I read that book and went, holy fuck, this is a legendary book, and this guy is on to something. And I just love that you continue to do this work. And unlike the Gary VDs and all the other arm-waving assholes, it's built on science, and it's built on decades and decades of research. And I'm glad that you are pioneering peak performance aging.

Thank you, sir. We try to work hard and we try to make it as rigorous as possible. Otherwise, it doesn't— otherwise, it's not that there's other people that have something wrong, it's that they haven't learned. Like, one of the fundamental lessons in peak performance, you're trying to really coach people at a global level and you're really paying attention to people's experiences. One of the truisms that we have at the Flow Research Collective is that biology scales, personality doesn't scale. And putting it differently, what works for me is not going to work for you. Most people figure out what works for them and then they try to teach it to other people as if that was the formula. And most of the time it fails. And the reason it fails is because there's like, where are you on the introversion extroversion scale? Or what are your risk tolerances? This is very individually different and it's shaped by personality and nature and nurture. And if you're an introvert versus an extrovert, I'm going to train you in peak performance in a totally different way. And it's not one-stop shopping. So a lot of the people who are out there training people to perform, there's a lot of extroverts out there, first of all, and they're always training people in these extroverted ways. Right. And it's great if you're an extrovert, but if you're an introvert, they're absolutely going to fail for you. Like, you don't even bother. And we like to start with the neurobiology because it's shaped by everyone, shaped by evolution and shared by everyone. The neurobiology scales. Personality just doesn't scale. And So I don't like to speak bad about, about, about any folks, but the thing that I tell people they wanna be wary of is somebody who's doing that. If they figured out what works for them and they're rah-rah, let me teach it to you and you can do what I did. They're lying. 'Cause the biology doesn't work that way. We're, we're not designed that way. So that's, that's the only comment I have on that one.

Stephen, please tell me you'll come back.

I'll come back.

When's your next book coming out?

Oh, I don't know. It's been a— I'm trying to take a break because I've literally written— I've been writing books. Um, I haven't taken a break in a decade. I wrote something like 9 books in a row, and I haven't— I— so I'm, um, I know what the next book is about. I actually know what the next 3 books are about. And if I write the another sci-fi book, I know what the next 4 are about. And I'm dying to write them all, but I'm trying to— I'd like to like, it's not even the writing. I'll be writing something next year. It's the, I don't want to launch a book for a little while.

Yes.

I need to just sort of be quiet and not have to have to do it.

It's not the writing of the book, is it?

I love the writing. I like writing the— people always say, you know, it's funny, like, I'm in this lucky position where I'm a lot of people's favorite authors. So I hear that a lot. And, you know, thank you so much. You helped me so much change my— and I'm always like, you know, okay, great, whatever. I don't write them for you. I write them for me. I write them to fix my brain. Like the fact that they help you, that's all secondary. That's like, okay, that's downstream from what I'm really trying to do. For me, it's a mental health concern, right? Like I'm just trying to keep myself sane.

Right. If I don't write this, I'm going to explode.

I'm crazy. Yeah, totally. So I don't mind the going out and talking to people about what I wrote. Obviously that's exciting. But I've done too much of it in a, in a, in a, in a row. And I need to just like, I need to pull back from that for a little bit.

Yes.

So I'm, I'm gonna try to not write a book for a couple of years just, just to take a break from that stuff.

Well, you don't have to write a book to come back and hang out here. I'll tell you that. You can come back anytime you want.

Thank you, sir.

Stephen, God bless you and thank you so much.

Brother, thank you. Be well.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. It feels good to pummel your to-do list and free up more space in your life. On the subject of punching things, meet Krista Stryker. She's an amateur boxer, journalist, entrepreneur, and world-renowned fitness expert. Here's what she had to say about training with us at the Flow Research Collective. Quote: Before learning about flow, I felt like life was just kind of happening to me. I felt there was no real control over it, why sometimes I have good days and sometimes I have bad days. After completing Zero to Dangerous, my life is a lot more intentional now. Being in flow has helped me to complete my second book as a writer and prepare for my next fight as an amateur boxer, and I can't thank the Flow Research Collective enough for it. That's epic to hear, Krista. We're super stoked that you shared that with us. And if you're listening in and you want to take back control of your time, your work, and your mind, go to getmoreflow.com. We'd love to work with you to achieve your boldest goals in less time and with more ease. Again, just go to getmoreflow.com to get started. All the best.

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