Riding the Entrepreneurial Flow

What is another thing that you recommend entrepreneurs to put in place effectively for maximal flow?

One of probably the most formidable and the most studied ones is the challenge-skill balance. Having that optimal balance between challenge and skill is what's going to allow for that flow state. There's just gazillions of productivity hacks out there that people can use, whether it's when they check email or do they turn off their phones or, you know, it's an N-of-1 experiment for everybody because every lifestyle is different and everybody's neural wiring is different and in that regard. Basically, try to get people not thinking about work. And that's where that lateral thinking and the creativity and the connecting the dots and putting the puzzle pieces together tends to take place. Not when you're grinding, trying to solve the problem. It's when you step away from the problem, give yourself a little bit of space, that the really great stuff tends to unfold. What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance. Access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective. Radio. Garrett McGann, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. It is great to have you here. I've been really excited for our conversation from all sorts of different perspectives. What you're interested in, the work you're doing, overlaps with, um, with our work just in really exciting ways from my perspective. You're an entrepreneur, you're a flow researcher, and many other things. And I wanted to start us off before we go to the flow topic and get nerdy on that side of things. I wanted to go through your entrepreneurial journey because It started quite a while ago, I believe around 2004 when you were in graduate school. You set up a consultancy based around sustainability and then moved into a number of different startups. The one I would love to talk about, which I know you had an exit with, is Kula. So to kick us off, can you give us a narrative overview of your journey from this integrity group back in graduate school up through a number of the companies you've built and exited to where you are now with your study of and interest in flow.

Sure. First of all, Ryan, thank you for having me. As you know, there's nothing I like talking about more than flow and entrepreneurship. They're my passion, my purpose. So one thing I don't like talking so much about is myself, but I guess in the context of a podcast, I'm more than happy to share my story a little bit and how I got from a point A to a very, very different point B. I guess that's kind of been a common theme in my life. You know, I guess I've been an entrepreneur my whole life, even before graduate school. You know, I left home at 16, hustled most of my life, found my way.

What were some of your earliest hustles?

I mean, at really young ages, I was like buying and selling everything I could collect. A lot of like trading cards. I got to be a teenager like collecting beers. Left home throwing rave parties. Built a company when I was in college to do videography on whitewater rivers. I used to be a competitive whitewater kayaker. Pretty much anything I could to make a living and get by, you know. I guess I always had problems with authority and like to do things my own way. I think a lot of entrepreneurs share that early story, but it's kind of all I know. Most of the— pretty much all the jobs I've ever created, I ever had, I created for myself. But yeah, it was in graduate school where I really kind of, I guess, legitimized and really started building businesses that had the potential to scale and grow. But getting there was a pretty circuitous journey. I was living in the mountains of Colorado. I was passionate about the environment, and I thought that was my direction, particularly around water, which is something that's scarce in the American West. And being a, a kayaker and a riverman, that was always my, my big driving passion. But in 2000, I took a trip to Africa to go kayak rivers in Africa, and I was— it was the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe was just taking over farms. There was a lot of violence going on. And I really, I guess it shifted my worldview a little bit. And I realized that it's really, really hard to talk about sustainability, ecology, and the environment when people are hungry and they can't feed their kids. And that was kind of the first big pivot that I took. So I immediately came home, graduated from college in Colorado, and started graduate school, moved up to Vancouver, Canada. And started my master's degree in essentially international development and got really interested in local livelihoods, poverty, economic development. And through a series of fortunate events, I ended up writing a manual or co-writing a manual that got published by the United Nations. And then they wanted us to field test it around the world. And that kind of accidentally built my first company that way. Built a consulting firm, started working with national governments, mostly in Africa, in the Middle East, in, uh, in Asia, working with indigenous communities in Northern Canada. And yeah, very fortunately kind of stumbled upon this business that grew really quickly. Within a couple years merged with a larger consulting firm. Was growing quite rapidly and life was good. You know, I was in my late 20s, almost 30, and had a successful company, made a good living, got to travel around the world. And, you know, on paper, at least what my friends saw was, hey, Garrett's living the dream. This looks pretty awesome what he's doing, a life of adventure and meaningful work. But when you're in the development world long enough, you also start to see the problematic side of it. And, you know, one of those challenges was that it was really hard to find purpose in the work because the outcomes of your work were often— they didn't materialize till much later in the game. And I wanted to do something that had an impact. I was always passionate about technology. And as I was kind of working on these processes around the world, what I was doing was bringing disparate stakeholders together to try to make consensus decisions on really, really complex issues like poverty reduction, on local livelihoods, on building local economies. And, you know, we would get these stakeholders together and usually we would have representatives from the government, we would have representatives from the development agencies, We'd have representatives from the nonprofit community. But so what we, we had some decision-making power, but we had very little resources. So even though we came up with great roadmaps and strategies, it was really, really difficult to execute on them because frankly, the money wasn't often there. And I had been asking myself for years, well, what if there was a way we could get the money to the table, get the businesses, the business community, especially the larger businesses, The concept for my first tech startup happened— I was working in Liberia. And it was post-war Liberia. And the country was in shambles. And it was a matter of building it back up from the ground up. There were huge players operating in Liberia. Firestone, the tire and rubber company, owns a huge swath of land. Of course, they weren't at the table. A lot of the other big players that were resource extractors, big Chinese companies, they weren't participating in it. I wanted to find a way where we could get those stakeholders involved in kind of improving, improving livelihoods. At the time, I was living in Canada. I was traveling back and forth to visit my family in Germany. And there was this growth of loyalty programs. And loyalty programs, everybody has experienced one or another, whether it's frequent flyer with their grocery store or something like that. But they were kind of popping up all over the world. And I realized that here's this virtual currency that people are getting rewarded for, for participating in their regular customer behavior. So the companies are actually rewarding you for doing something. What if we could take this currency and we realized that there was hundreds of billions of US dollars in unredeemed loyalty currency out there? What if we could find a way to take some of that and shift it towards social good? And that sparked Kula Causes, which was my first venture-backed tech startup. Launched it in 2010. And through many trials and tribulations, grew the business, got some incredible clients like Coca-Cola and Kellogg's and airlines and hotels and restaurants. And yeah, grew the business. And through that experience, which was probably the catalyst for where I am now, ended up selling the company and making a pivot.

What was the hardest thing, Garrett, about going from the development world to the tech startup world? And then what was your favorite thing about the difference between those two worlds? So hardest and then, you know, best change.

Wow. I mean, there's a lot, right? When you think of the development world, a lot of people think, oh, I'm going to get into this field because I'm doing something good for the world. You know, it's meaningful and it has purpose because I'm contributing my knowledge and experience to making the world a better place. Once you've done it long enough, you realize that that model is actually inverted, that you're getting so much more from that experience. The reward is actually coming to the practitioner more than it is to to the people on the end. So there's, there's this initial phase of an inflated ego of like, I'm doing good work, I'm making the world a better place. And then it shifts and it realizes, you realize that you're maybe actually getting more out of it than you're ever able to give. And, you know, that can be disheartening. And I think a lot, that's why a lot of people think of the development game that are in it, think of it as a young person's game. And part of it is because it can be strenuous and you can be in challenging environments. But the other part is, I think oftentimes you have this shift, right? You have this kind of paradigm shift from this idealism to realism. And when I went back into tech, I guess it was like that idealism turning back on again, where I had purpose and I had a little bit more control over outcomes. I was able to actually create meaningful change in real time, even though of course there's a lag. You still have to get customers to use things and adopt whatever it is that you're trying to create. But it was more of a direct connection between my efforts and the potential outcomes that come into play. So that was the, that was the big change. On the flip side, Being an entrepreneur, especially at a high-growth startup, especially one that has venture capital behind it, is stressful. There is a lot of pressure. There's a lot of anxiety. There is a huge range of emotions that almost every first-time founder in that context goes through. I think of moments of feeling that imposter syndrome, and what am I doing here? Do I really know what I'm doing? You're charting new territory. You're treading new ground. Kind of by definition. And that makes you kind of challenge yourself and question yourself in many contexts. So I did what my generation was taught to do and what all the thought leaders told us to do, which was what I now affectionately call hustle porn, which is you got to be the hardest working guy in the room. There's always somebody working longer and later and harder than you, or, you know, the Elon Musk, like being an entrepreneur is like chewing on glass and staring into the abyss. And I bought into that stuff completely.

I was like, well, I'm just going to work harder. I'm going to work longer.

I'm going to work harder. And you do that for a little while and it may be okay. You do that for 3 or 4 years and it starts to have dire consequences.

So 2 follow-up questions there. One is, what was, you know, an average day in the life like during the peak of your hustle porn indulgence? And then overall, when you look back on those 2 periods of development and then Kula, What was higher flow in terms of your experience hour to hour? In which context did you have a greater ability to access flow?

Well, higher flow, the easy answer for me and very personally was neither. I spent the previous decade chasing whitewater and hucking myself down mountains for years. And where I didn't know it at the time, I didn't even know the term flow. I didn't know what it meant, but I was absolutely addicted to it. And I was seeking it all the time because I found it in such deep and profound ways in other aspects of my life. In the work environment, I found that it was rare. That I had those experiences, period. Whether it was in a startup, probably it was less in the tech startup because there was so much more challenge as opposed to skill. There was just so much more stress going through it. There were so many external variables beyond your control. So maybe there was a little more in the development world because so much of the development world is dialectic. It's built on discourse and human interaction. And what I always say, building relationships of love and trust, right? You walk into a community in the middle of Africa as an upper middle class guy from the US. And there's a big power dynamic there that you have to find ways to break down. And the only ways you can do that is through meaningful interaction. So there were probably more flow experiences in that particular context. But if I look at it kind of across my entire life, I would say there was very little at that time in the work environment and tons of it outside of work. It was interesting. It was actually 2 years into Kula when the stress and the anxiety had built up so much that I finally said, I'm going to get myself checked out. And I went to a psychiatrist and I said, I want to know if I have attention deficit disorder, which I had always assumed that I did and self-medicated myself and found my own little hacks to be able to deal with it. But It was in my late 30s, mid-30s where I was like, I want to know for sure. And I went through the barrage of tests and they were like, yep, classic case, ADHD. What do you want? What drug do you want, Ritalin or Adderall? You know, was kind of their answer for it. And it wasn't until I sold the company, moved into the mountains and kind of reclaimed these other parts of my life where I had these such incredibly profound flow experiences that sent me on this trajectory of wanting to explore that a little more, particularly in the case of founders and entrepreneurship.

So can you tell us about that journey into the mountains then, and what were some of those flow experiences like?

Yeah, um, so when I sold the business, I was 20 kilos heavier. I feel like I had aged 20 years, you know. I went from being What, 50 pounds?

Yeah.

I mean, I'm sitting at like 185 now and I was at 230 when I sold it. But I mean, I can't even— you know, back then I didn't track myself very well. I could not imagine like what my heart rate variability was, what my cortisol levels were looking like. I mean, I was drinking more. I'd taken up cigarette smoking, something I hadn't done since I was 17 years old. All the bad coping mechanisms kind of came into play. So when I sold the business, I said, I need to recapture myself and my life. No more 200 days a year out of suitcases and hotels and on airplanes, cocktail meetings, and having a drink to calm down and get myself to bed at night. And I'm going to flip the switch and do a 180. So I rented a little cabin on 9 acres at 9,000 feet in the mountains, right on a whitewater river. And I planted a garden and I pulled out my kayaks and I started kayaking every day, literally 250 days a year for 3 years, like pretty much every day, sometimes 3 or 4 times a day. And I guess the part that was unique about it is in the early stages, I would do it alone. And that's not something that's really recommended in this sport. If you flip upside down and hit your head, get knocked unconscious, and there's nobody there to help you, Well, that's a really, really tragic situation that would unfold. But I knew the river well. I had been paddling it so many times. I would go out alone. And, you know, pretty challenging whitewater. And as you and Steven talk about a lot, you know, the risk variable in flow, I would drop into a very, very present state that I would not normally experience in everyday life. And then one day I was going out, the water was pretty high, I was feeling feeling a little gripped and I put on the river, paddled down to the takeout. I got to the takeout and I pulled my skirt to get out of my boat. And I had this moment where I came to and I realized that I had no recollection of the previous 90 minutes, that I completely blanked out. And initially I got kind of scared. I was like, is something wrong with me? And, you know, I talked to some friends about it. Nobody really knew. They were asking me like, oh, what are you doing, smoking a bunch of weed before you go? You know, and like asking the kind of classic like dirtbag mountain athlete questions. And, uh, and I didn't really have an answer for it. And then a couple of weeks later it happened again. And then I started putting the pieces together that I was so present and focused in the moment. That I had this transformative time experience. So I immediately started researching it. I was like, what does that? And that's how I kind of— I'd heard a little bit about flow before, you know, I knew of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, but I never really started reading and digging into it. And I said, holy crap, you know, not only did I have it in as profound and deep of a level as I think I could possibly experience, but it had such a profound impact on my state of mind, my well-being, that I was able to start doing other tasks right afterward and be so much more focused and so much more productive that I started to see a correlation that if I could pull some of the magic from this one part of my life that some people would consider recreation, and I could leverage that into this other part of my life, which people would consider work, that there's some real magic there that we can do incredible things with.

That's very cool to hear. I love that. And then, so then you went from there, maybe I'm mixing up the chronology, but you went from there, I believe, to founding and building and exiting another company, or maybe that happened afterwards, but can you articulate kind of next steps from there? What happened with the I believe it was Effectuate Apps, and then how you got to where you are now researching flow. And also, I'd love you to touch on what, what did you find when you started researching flow that pulled you in so deeply? Was it Csikszentmihalyi's work, or, or what, what pulled you in?

Well, I mean, after selling Kula, spending some time in the mountains, like any lifelong entrepreneur, you start getting the itch to create value again. And I'm not an artist. I'm a pretty mediocre musician. To me, my canvas is business. It's where I can be creative and exploratory. So it was only a matter of time that I did that again, kind of self-invested in a couple little ventures that didn't really go very far. You do this long enough, you learn to fail fast and quit before it gets ugly. And then I had this opportunity to come to Europe and help out a university building up kind of their startup ecosystem. And while I was there, I was working with a bunch of young founders that were building their businesses. And in Switzerland, it's really hard to find software engineers. And when you find them, they're incredibly expensive because a software engineer coming right out of school in Switzerland can get a job at a bank with 12 weeks of paid holiday and all the perks. Why go work for half that pay for a job that may not be around for 6 months? So I was trying to help these founders and a random series of events, and I found myself in Macedonia. And I connected with looking for software developers and found a bunch online and hopped on a plane to Skopje, Macedonia. And I'm pretty well traveled, but it was the first time in my life that I actually had to look up the country on a map to know exactly where it was. But flew to Macedonia, met some incredible young engineers, and started connecting them with the founders that I was working with. And next thing I know, the company grew. There were 30 employees. We had tons of businesses, and it was a nice little accidental venture that came along the way. But ended up selling the, the client base and the company to the guys in Macedonia. They needed it to grow, and and I wanted to go walk about for a while and explore my next journey. And I wanted to dig deeper into this flow topic and spend some time. So my partner and I decided to do a trip around the world. And, you know, I'd already read Flow by Csikszentmihalyi, but here's a little plug for you guys. I picked up The Rise of Superman before I got on the plane. And I started reading that book. And what I loved about that book is it connected with me personally because it took this whole domain of flow that I had experienced so profoundly and kind of put it into context for me a little better. And it helped me differentiate and identify why I was able to get it in these certain environments and why I wasn't in the other. And I think the variable that stuck with me so much and it still continues to stick with me in the work that I'm doing today is this variable variable of risk. And it's one that Csikszentmihalyi doesn't talk that much about. And a lot of the flow researchers don't talk that much about. But when Steven put it in the context of gravity sports athletes, that kind of triggered something in me that said, hey, maybe when I'm looking at entrepreneurs, this isn't like looking at them through the lens of flow at work, but it's looking at them through this lens of like a very intense and extreme experience. Because there are a lot of parallels between the entrepreneurial journey and the startup journey. It's a different kind of risk, reputational and financial versus life and limb, but the correlates are there. And that was really one of the key triggers. So I owe Steven a lot of credit for kind of sparking some missing pieces that I needed to take this further.

It's interesting that risk came through as the biggest variable. And then, so to switch, to pivot a little bit to the flow topic, and thank you for sharing that background, background and on the journey so far. You are currently doing research into founders and flow. Can you tell us a little bit about what that research looks like, where you're doing it, and then to start us off, and we'll dive deeper into it, what the most surprising finding has been so far?

Yeah, so, you know, I decided I wanted to explore this topic and I started doing self-directed research on my travels. I didn't know what I was going to do with it. I just wanted to do it. I'm not a big fan of entrepreneurship research, and I'm sure there are people at the university, if they hear this, they're going to scoff at me, but entrepreneurs learn by doing. They tend to learn from other entrepreneurs. If I was going to find anything of value, I wanted to find a way to kind of intravenously get it into the bodies of entrepreneurs and not through academic literature that nobody tends to read. After being in the development world and creating so many strategies and plans that collected dust on the shelf, that was absolutely not appealing to me. So I was just planning on doing that, and then I randomly connected with a professor here at this university that I'm at now, WHU in Germany, which is a very small, very elite business school, 1,400 students, but a massive footprint. You know, there have been 8 unicorn billion-dollar startups coming out of this university in the past 15 years. So it's a unique little place. But I met this professor, turns out he was also a competitive kayaker. And so we immediately connected and we kind of discussed the idea of doing a PhD. And my initial thought was, you know, I'm in my 40s, I'm a little old for this shit. I don't know if I really want to want to take that journey, but I've got family. My mom is in Germany, my sister's here. I thought it was a nice opportunity to be a little closer to home. So a couple years ago, I decided I would take this research topic and, you know, bring it into the support of the academic environment where I can get people that can take a very practical-minded entrepreneur and teach me some skills on structuring, structuring research a little more effectively. But I came in with this topic of, you know, essentially how do we— how do entrepreneurs achieve flow, and what are the kind of antecedents and the correlates of flow in that entrepreneurial context? So I initially started the project a year ago with— I had about 35 entrepreneurs participating. I wanted to find an environment where they were all operating on the same conditions. The challenge— there's so many challenges with studying entrepreneurs in the wild.

Right?

Like, they're all in such different contexts. They're all operating on such unique and different business models. They're at different stages. They're coming from different parts of the world. But I found an environment where they were all operating under a control. And that control is startup accelerator programs. You know, if you're— if you're not familiar with startup accelerator programs, there are ones— pretty famous ones around the world, like Y Combinator. Like Techstars, that have spurned off some of the largest, most successful brands that, that we know today. The nice thing about these programs is they're fixed-term, and all of the, the founders that are participating in it go through the same kind of regimented process. Techstars calls it the playbook. So they're all doing the same basic stuff every day, which provided a level of, of a control within the study. So I partnered with two of these programs in Munich and Berlin, recruited participants, and did the— last year did the kind of classic flow study, which is self-reporting. Now, a lot of flow research originally was done with experience sampling. So people were getting pinged at random times throughout the day, and then they would have to answer a survey. That doesn't work with entrepreneurs. You know, when they're focused on something, you got to leave them the hell alone. They're just not going to answer you. Right? They've got way, way bigger fish to fry. So I had to find a way to alter that a little bit. So we did kind of a reflective daily diary at the end of their day where they would report. And we started going through this process, and about 3 weeks into the 14-week study, COVID lockdown hit. So all of them had to go home, everything got shut down, they started working from their homes. We still kept collecting data, There was a big kind of perturbation and gap in the middle of it, but we kept collecting data throughout. But one of the things that I realized is that the problem— it was another problem that I didn't expect studying entrepreneurs in the wild, which is these are people that already consider themselves to be pretty high performers. They generally are pretty high performers. They have tremendous risk tolerance. They have the ability to persevere through complexity and generally manage stress pretty well. And they also want to present themselves in that light because one of their next steps in growing their business is raising venture capital. And in order to raise venture capital, you kind of have to have this perception of, I mean, to put it bluntly, having your shit together. So there was, I believe there was a lot of inherent bias in. I think they were all really good at gaming the study and really good at kind of guiding it in a way that made them look as good as possible. Even though it was anonymized, even though that they knew nobody was going to attach them, they still had this inherent need to present themselves as operating at a very, very high level. So in a lot of ways, COVID was a great a great kind of random putting the brakes on the study because it gave me time to take a step back and reflect. And I said, you know, how do we kind of manage this bias? Started digging back into the literature, started talking to some tremendous flow researchers in Germany and around the world. And I identified through the literature that there are some physiological indicators and biomarkers of flow. They're not totally clear yet. We don't know if it's a cascade. We don't know if you need all of them or some of them, but we know that there are some that have pretty strong correlations to flow. So I started looking for technology that I would be able to do that with, and I bought a ton of different wearable devices, fitness trackers. And something that I've been doing for years is my own kind of N-of-1 studies on myself with exercise, with diet, with different molecules, like anything I could do to kind of optimize my concentration, focus, and performance. And kind of ran myself during lockdown through a whole bunch of these tools that I could use to measure, as well as different interventions that I could kind of practice on myself. And then I talked with a lot of entrepreneurs that weren't participating in the study, and I realized that A, most of them at this point are aware of the concept of flow. Most of them have a bunch of flow hacks that they're already using. So I shifted the study and said, all right, we're going to put some wearable fitness trackers on them, be able to at least track their resting heart rate, their heart rate variability, respiratory rate, overall day strain and activity, sleep cycles, and then have them also do the, the Flow Short Scale survey. So we would be able to see their self-reporting, but also take a look at the physiological underpinnings to see if they correlate. The key thing is, is I'm more— that's only the baseline of the study. It's not actually a quantitative study. It's a qualitative study. Being an entrepreneur, like, we can crunch data all day and we might be able to see some trends and patterns in that data. But what I'm interested in is What are people doing to actually affect change? What are these high-performing people doing to mitigate the complexities and stresses of their environment to operate optimally? So as all this data is being collected, it's being dumped into a dashboard that they can play with. They can see their data in real time. And then we're going to do— at the end of the study, we're doing a deep dive to really understand what are the different things that they did along the way to optimize. And we're already seeing some pretty cool results. Some things that are expected, some things that are maybe a little bit less expected. And, you know, I'm always hesitant to talk about too much of the data when we're, you know, 18 into 85 days this time around. But yeah, we're seeing some cool things. I mean, one is, so the beginning of this accelerator program, they have 2 weeks of something called Mentor Madness, and each of the teams meet 8 mentors a day. In this very, very intensive, like 20 minutes, you get grilled, move on to the next one. You do that for 2 weeks straight. You know, after a week, it feels like your head's going to explode. After 2 weeks, like you don't know what, you know, what's up or down anymore. And you're getting conflicting feedback. And people, some people are telling you you're shit. Other people are telling you you're amazing. And you're trying to filter this all out. I saw HRVs slowly start to drop and then plummet. So almost the entire cohort of participants were just like, but there were a couple that managed to go on morning runs and do other things that were keeping it up a little bit better. They were having better sleep. They were having overall better biomarkers and their flow responses were better as well. So there are already some clear Again, not surprising, but clear that people that were like maintaining their physical health were having pretty good contributions to their mental health. More recently, we've seen people take weekends off because it's start— the program's starting to stabilize in a phase. And, um, had someone the other day that went skiing and who was kind of scoring pretty low, took 2 days off and went skiing. In the past few days, just been crushing it. And just been doing great, you know, again, 2 days after her little 2-day ski trip, but now it's going great. So there's some interesting things that are, that are unfolding.

Interesting. Yeah, that's one of the things we always recommend people do is have a primary flow activity that they can engage in with a high reliability of flow, like skiing or kayaking or surfing or whatever it is, or a creative endeavor, with the expectation being that the, the ability to get into Flow will transfer to other activities, that it's not activity dependent, but that it transfers across. So it's super interesting to see that some of that data is coming through already.

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

All the best.

What, what are your— from, from having, you know, started obviously researching flow within an entrepreneurial context directly and then having been in entrepreneurial contexts, What is some advice you would give founders to achieve the goal of growing their company, you know, well and fast, but by leveraging flow? I think ultimately, you know, people— what people want the most, whether, you know, flow is going to help with this or not, is in that context success entrepreneurially. So what are some of the peak performance or flow pieces of advice you, you would recommend to, to someone who is kind of locked into some sort of entrepreneurial success as the primary outcome?

Well, there's, I mean, there's, there's a ton, right? Um, and we can talk about it from the individual flow level, and we can also talk about it from the team flow level, right? So what, what can—

let's start, yeah, let's start individual, and then I'd love to go to team as well. And I've got some questions where we'll loop back to the research you're doing right now.

So there's, there's a lot of analogues between flow language and entrepreneurship language. And you know, any discipline is really just kind of learning the lingua franca of the other. Oftentimes you see so much, so many similarities in there. And I always like, I try to connect the dots with entrepreneurs going from like Aristotelian philosophy, using Aristotelian philosophy to kind of bridge the difference between like entrepreneurship and, or even Stoic philosophy. For some reason, the headier and more academic you are, the more they tend to resonate with those kinds of things. But first and foremost, I think you got to start at the beginning, which is, as Simon Sinek always talks about, about the why. Like, what's your why? What's your purpose? And, you know, we can go into self-determination theory and intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation, but in the end, like There's not going to be flow and there's not going to be success if you don't have intrinsic motivation. And you can separate the entrepreneurs from the wantrepreneurs really, really quickly that way. You know, the, the real entrepreneurs, they're, they're myopically focused on solving a problem. You know, the entrepreneurship by definition is value creation, but really it's about solving particular problems that people have that aren't effectively being solved. Right now. So if you're not passionate about the problem you're solving, particularly if you haven't even experienced that problem yourself, you're going to be far less likely to have success at that domain. Of course, there are exceptions, and there are people that are opportunistic and just happen to be timely, and all the, all the stars align just right. But as entrepreneurship gets more global and more competitive, there's something called founder-market fit, Founder market fit means, are you the right person to solve this problem? Are you the right person for this business? And I tell young entrepreneurs all the time, does it make more sense that I give you $1 million for 25% of your business, or do I give you $2 million for 51% and fire you and put someone else in your place that could do it better? Right? So if—

That's a great question, by the way. I love that to dwell on it for entrepreneurs.

You got to be the right person. It's got to be, you know, it is your competitive advantage as an individual. There's very few entrepreneurship theorists I like, but there's one at the University of Virginia named Sarah Sarasvati. She talks about effectuation, studying all these successful entrepreneurs around the world for years. She identified something called the bird-in-the-hand principle. Bird-in-the-hand principle says successful entrepreneurs build businesses based on what they know, who they know, who they've experienced. What they've experienced. So what resources do I have as an individual that makes me unique? Build a business that's within your image. So you need to have a purpose, you need to have the motivation, and you need to have the connection to that problem. That's probably the foundational piece.

Yeah, I love that as a foundational point. And given all the emphasis obviously within, you know, the entrepreneurial world on lean and agile and customer discovery and gathering feedback, pivoting based on that feedback to get product-market fit, how do you reconcile doing what the market tells you you should do with doing what you are passionate about and where your founder market fit lies?

Well, I mean, it really depends on context, right? Like with Steve Jobs, they talked about the reality distortion field, right, where the, the market was telling him something totally different, the advisors were telling him something completely different, but he followed his instinct and he basically made the market become what he wanted it to be. You know, he created the change. And sometimes disruptive innovation requires something like that. If you're a very practical entrepreneur and you want to find a nice little niche and carve out a small business focused on something very narrow, then yeah, you're probably going to have to make some trade-offs, right? It may not be your core vision or your dream in the end, but If you want to do something extraordinary, something truly disruptive, it's what Steve Blank calls Horizon 3 innovation, right? The ones that don't take over markets or market share, they literally create entirely new markets. They do something so profoundly different that the world is affected. And I think in those situations, you're kind of myopically focused. You have a vision, and you're trying to convert people. It's almost like proselytizing, right? Like a missionary would do. You're trying to convert the people around you to your way. Does that happen very often? Definitely not. That's the rare exception. So yeah, there are trade-offs along the way, but I think the bigger question is like, how do we manipulate and manage that journey? Like you talked about discovery and engagement. In the end, The market is going to dictate things. The customer is going to dictate things. If they don't like what you're selling, they're not going to buy it. And if enough people don't buy it, you're not going to have a business. So there is some kind of realization there. But how do you optimize that particular experience, I think, is what's more relevant, because successful firms are guided by successful founders. Optimal firms are guided by optimal founders and optimal team members. So if everyone— if you think of like the the collective of an organization, if they have that gestalt where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole and they're performing so well together, chances are they're going to be able to manage those pivots and those dynamics more effectively. So, when I was starting the study, people were asking, hey, are you going to look at the outcomes of the businesses? And my take is it doesn't matter how great everyone performs, you might be able to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic failure or immediate failure, but there are external variables— the market, the competition. There could be global catastrophes or pandemics or all sorts of unforeseen variables that could determine the efficacy and the outcome of the business, that no matter how well you perform internally, it's outside of your control. And that, of course, is one of the interesting aspects when you look at the triggers and the kind of characteristics of flow. The sense of control, the ambiguous feedback, the clear goals, and you've got moving goalposts that you're often chasing. So it makes, at least for founders in certain roles, especially the kind of top-level original founders, CEOs, core strategic decision-makers, there's a number of those flow characteristics that are really, really hard to achieve in that context.

That makes total sense. And I think attempting to optimize for founder product market fit and get that full alignment is, you know, obviously what's optimal then based on what you're mentioning there. So I interjected, you mentioned purpose and passion as the first thing. What is a second or another thing that you recommend entrepreneurs to put in place effectively for maximal flow?

Well, I mean, I think you have to kind of deconstruct the environment, right? And I mean, we could talk about this from all of the different kind of, uh, characteristics, or I think Stephen calls them triggers of flow. They can all be kind of contextualized within the entrepreneurial setting. And that's, you know, and a lot of the scales and a lot of the kind of traditional research around flow is kind of breaking it down by those different things. But, you know, One of probably the most formidable and the most studied ones is the challenge-skill balance, right? Like, you know, having that optimal balance between challenge and skill is what's going to allow for that flow state. Almost by definition, when you're treading new, new ground and dealing with uncharted territory, whether you've been a first-time founder or this is your 10th, 10th business, you're still in this new, uncertain challenging and ambiguous state, right? So how do you, how do you manage that? And I mean, it really comes down to, at least what I've seen so far, is the way people break down their individual tasks and their individual aspects of their days and their kind of core objectives. And there's a number of different tools out there, you know. I would say OKRs, for example, objectives and key results, is probably one of the more formidable management tools that may be more conducive to flow because it's objective-focused. So it's establishing the goal first, right? And then it's allowing everybody to work towards that goal simultaneously and track their progress along the way. Not a lot of startups use that. A lot of people think of these things in more kind of larger-scale, more established companies, but there are tools like that that can work really well. On the individual level, you know, it's It's breaking things down into bite-sized chunks. Engineers are really, really good at this, right? They'll work on a little piece of code or a really small function. You can see it a lot in Agile sprints. They'll create these kind of micro-sprints to do a really small task that's easily accomplishable, even though the bigger, more complex picture is less so. So you can integrate certain things into your work experience. There's some, you know, I mean, concentration is probably the classic one. And what I've been seeing in the data so far is some people are really good at it. Engineers are great at getting into that space for some reason. You know, they'll throw on the noise-canceling headphones, put the sign on their back that says, "F off, I'm coding," and they'll get into their own little bubble and they'll do their hour, 2 hours of really deeply focused work. A guy like me, if it's been like a CEO, I'm switching hats, I'm going from capitalization to marketing to product to human resources and you're getting pulled in all sorts of directions, it's hard. It's hard. I'm not sure I have an answer for how you can really overcome that concentration piece other than compartmentalize your day. I mean, we've heard of all— I mean, there's just gazillions of productivity hacks out there that people can use, whether it's when they check email or do they turn off their phones or how do they organize their workday to maximize focus. To me, it's an N-of-1 experiment for everybody because every lifestyle is different and everybody's kind of neural wiring is different in that regard.

Yeah, that transition is very challenging from individual contributor who's concentration heavy because of being the primary one executing tasks for extended periods of time, to leader who, as Andy Grove, used to be the CEO of Intel, describes it, has to optimize for managerial leverage and whose productivity is determined by the productivity of the organization, you know, rather than their own individual productivity. Even from your own experience, how did you navigate that transition from being the primary workhorse to being someone who's got to optimize the productivity, not of yourself, but of all these other people to have maximum results occur? And how does flow fit into that? Because often, yeah, because the tasks that you get to do, even though they're more productive, are often less flowy. It's more shallow work. It's more task switching, as you mentioned.

Yeah. I mean, first of all, I think there's a profound difference between a large organization and a small upstart organization. You compare Intel to Kula, something that has a couple thousand employees versus a dozen or 20, there's a really big difference. You don't have management layers. You don't have big hierarchical structures. The CEO is oftentimes having equal dialogue with the lowest paid person on the ladder. Oftentimes the CEO in a startup is the lowest paid person in the company. You know, so there are— it's really a different environment, right? So you're not optimizing the organization because the organization is still evolving and growing so fast. It's like saying you're optimizing a toddler, you know, for fitness when they're, they're growing at such an incredible rate. You don't know what's going to change during that short period of time. So I don't think optimization— what you can do is you can optimize individuals, right? You can optimize culture and you can optimize individuals to perform and operate their best. And I'm not sure I've ever done it really, really well. I've no— I've learned what not to do. I've learned a few tips and tricks along the way. But I think one is empowerment, right? Everybody needs to feel a sense of ownership, you know. And it's not just giving somebody stock options to say, hey, you're an owner of the company now. You have to give them autonomy. Autonomy is something that founders particularly are really hard at giving up because you have this vision that came from your mind that you are now executing on and more people are believing in that. To be able to say, hey, I'm going to trust and I'm going to let go and I'm going to let someone take this piece of my vision, make it their own, and take it in their direct— in whatever direction they want, it's a hard thing to do. I had an investor that used to always tell me, Garrett, you have to afford people the opportunity to fail. And that's something that really, really stuck with me because I was so focused on trying to essentially optimize, line everything up to fit the vision, to move forward in this kind of strategic way, because that's the way I was trained and I was thinking, that I probably didn't always empower people as well as they could. And in the end, like, to have an organization that's dynamic and engaged and, and probably with maximal flow people have to have their own sense of autonomy. They have to have their own feelings of control. They have to feel empowered. So you can do that culturally in a lot of ways. You know, I love the Jeff Bezos approach of like, you know, making it hard to say no, being additive, kind of being very dialectic, giving people the freedom to explore. You know, Google does it great for a large company, giving people their kind of creative time. You obviously can't do stuff like that in a startup, but you can do social fun, like human interaction. That's why I took a lot from the development world, which is like, you know, how do we build these meaningful relationships of love and trust where we feel like, at least in the work environment, we feel like a family, but also affording people to have those experiences outside as well. And that's what— that's something that's really dangerous in a startup is it gets so insular. And it gets so intense. People aren't connecting with their family and their friends, and they're all just grinding and working on this kind of shared goal that, you know, a lot of the magic happens. I think it was— was it Stolberg that talks about the growth equation, or like strain plus recovery equals, equals growth? In the startup, you got plenty of strain, and everybody's focused on growth. And there is almost always a shortage of recovery time. So nowadays, I do things a lot differently than I did my first times around and basically try to get people not thinking about work, thinking about the things that they love outside of their startup journey. And that's where that lateral thinking and the creativity and the connecting the dots and putting the puzzle pieces together tends to, tends to take place. Not when you're grinding, trying to solve the problem. It's when you step away from the problem give yourself a little bit of space that the really great stuff tends to unfold.

Yes, it's so important, the space for the breakthrough ideas. You know, people, I think, often, as you mentioned doing, you know, with your first startup, people way overemphasize execution and way underemphasize strategy. And, you know, one idea can be worth months or years of execution. So I think that's, that's super important. I'm curious, do you— are you seeing different cultures form within the different teams in the accelerator that you're running the study in? And are there any notable differences there that may be worth noting that are, that are driving more flow within some teams and less flow within others? And they're obviously the small teams given that they're at the accelerator stage, but often culture can form even with a group of 2 or 3.

Yeah, for sure. And, um, you know, I want to be cautious not to be overgeneralized while the data is still coming in. And, um, you know, if any of these guys are watching, they probably will know who they are. But, but what I can say is that, you know, some of the classic things that you would think of, like the ones— so the great thing— so I'm using Whoop fitness trackers to track them. So the nice thing is when you have an elevated heart rate for a while, it'll do an activity detection and then it'll ask you, what are you, what were you doing during that time? So they can just say, hey, I was going for a run or I was doing whatnot. So I can see generally a lot of their physical activity. A lot of guys are even, and girls are tracking their meditation as well. So I'm seeing that. What I'm definitely finding is people that are doing things like meditation and are doing significant physical activity are doing quite well. The people that are more sedentary, I can see it in their caloric burn and their heart rates, tend to score lower. But I'm also seeing that in their autonomic nervous system data as well. They're not recovering as well. The strain is different in this context and the psychological and the mental strain that that takes place in one of the— in an accelerator and on this kind of very aggressive founder journey is profound. And it's physiologically visible. The engineers are having a harder time, I think, without question so far. There are some engineers that are like avid runners that run 5, 6 days a week. They're performing a lot better. There are some non-engineers that are not very active that are are really, really struggling. And there have already been, you know, some that have had, you know, persistent migraines from stress that have reduced their sleep. I've seen HRVs down in the teens and recovery scores like 1, 2, 3%. I've seen people sleeping for less than 2 hours a night for 3, 4 nights in a row.

I mean, that is worth just pausing out for a moment, like the, the, at least if you're a human being, the level of useful uselessness that you end up at after, you know, 4 hours, 4 nights of 2 hours of sleep is extreme. Thought that compromising that sleep is going to result in greater productivity gains, you know, is really backwards, at least in my opinion.

I mean, 100%. 100%. But I certainly fell into that mentality is like caffeine and nicotine or whatever will power me through until I can crash on the weekends. But studies on circadian rhythm certainly show otherwise. What do they say after 10 hours of wakefulness? Every hour beyond that, it's like adding 0.005% alcohol content to your blood, right? So you can imagine 2 hours of sleep for 4 nights and it's so profound and I'm seeing these people's physiological data. It's difficult because you want to intervene. I literally want to step in and intervene because I care about these people too. I'm also a mentor for them. And so I have been, I'm like, hey, check in with yourself, get some rest. You know, this is a— it's a marathon, not a sprint. But, um, it's hard. And I guess that's one of the other patterns I've seen too, is I do a baseline. I do this flow frequency scale at the beginning to kind of understand people's disposition and their potential for scale. I guess maybe they call it like the autotelic personality. Corinna Peifer designed this frequency scale, and I asked them for a bunch of their historical, uh, their history on founding a business, what their role is, how many startups they've created before, you know, what their core competencies are, do they have domain expertise in the industry that they're, they're tackling, and so forth. And the ones that have been on a startup journey, that have been a founder before, seem to have more tools in their toolkit. They seem to do more outside of work, be a little bit more balanced. You know, I see their wake— their waking times and their sleeping times in this app. And their deep sleep, REM sleep, light sleep, how many disturbances they have per night. There's a lot of data coming out of there. And I've only been kind of glancing at that resolution of data on my own, but I see a lot of patterns that I'm really familiar with, and I'm definitely seeing more of those rough patterns with people that are on their first-time founder journey. I think once you've done it before, you've kind of kicked your own ass a few times, you start learning how to manage it. You've got more, you have more interventions that you can use. And so far it seems to be exercise and meditation have been really, really big ones. Once we get into the qualitative component of the study, we're going to be talking about caffeine and nicotine and dietary approaches. And you know, I've got a huge list of other interventions that we're going to be digging through to really understand what they were doing during those times other than work. But the ones that are— seem to be doing nothing but work at the expense of recovery and sleep and balance in their lives, their bodies are responding poorly. And my guess is their psychological state is responding, responding pretty poorly as well.

It sounds like recovery is a huge one, and I think that's more so so the case within early-stage entrepreneurial teams and founders because, you know, the drive is such a given, that box is checked so fully that it really presumably is, you know, is the recovery side of the spectrum rather than the willingness to embrace stress and exert side of the spectrum. One of the things though that I've seen in bigger organizations post that immediate founding team when more hires are being brought on and things like that, is that the implementation of psychological safety or flow practices and principles or a heavy emphasis on recovery or well-being can get distorted with a tolerance for complacency and entitlement to, you know, a job that perfectly aligns with your purpose or something like that. And the assumption that that is on the founder to somehow kind of create that for you. How do you recommend people mitigate that and ensure that organizations as they grow and scale aren't just high flow but are high performance, which I think can actually be two different things as well?

Sure, sure. I think it's clear that flow is not analog to firm success. There are too many variables at play. First, looking at it from the startup perspective, and then we can talk about the bigger one. But from the startup perspective, I mean, these are startups that are in an accelerator program. By definition, acceleration means to increase the speed. Really, but all startups, that is really their core objective, is to move fast. I mean, what Facebook says, move fast and break things. Like, there's so many metaphors for this stuff, but their goal is to move as quickly as possible. They have a burn rate of how much they spend a month. They've got a runway of how much time they have till all that money is gone, and they need to execute as quickly as possible. So if you're not keeping up with the pace of that organization, you can't hide in the management layer. You know, it is so visibly transparent. And I'm not sure, like, speed is important for sure, but most founders take that speed to the extreme, right? Because they're not really defining what they're chasing anything beyond that runway, you know? And if they're thinking about this early on in the process, they'll keep their burn rates lower. They'll be more conservative in the process. They'll buy themselves a bit more time. But once they once they dive in and they get committed to that really fast pace, they're in trouble, right? They're generally in trouble because you can't really hide in that context. You know, larger organizations— I mean, I, again, I don't see that there's— when we're talking about it in the context of flow, like, things slow down in a bigger organization when it's cash flow positive and it's generating money. You start you're not looking for product-market fit anymore. You're now looking for optimization and market share. And that means you've got more bandwidth. If you're taking in more money than you're spending, then your runway is getting longer. You're essentially, for every dollar of profit, you're buying yourself more time. And I think this variable of time is, is really the core difference between a stable kind of growth stage business or scale-up versus a startup. Startup has the one resource. They say, "Oh, I need more money. I need more money." But in the end, all money's doing is buying them time to get closer to product-market fit and profitability. So it's just such a different context in that regard. And I'm certainly not an expert on big companies because I've never worked for one in my life, but I, it's almost like comparing, you know, apples and oranges in that regard, in terms of the experience and how you're kind of optimizing. I think, you know, if you can create more flow, you can create more productivity. If you can create more wellbeing, uh, feelings of, uh, of autonomy and competence, I think that those things work across the board. But as long as you have this like speed variable in there, you're generally in for more struggle than you would want.

One of the quotes that I've always liked that you reminded me of, I can't remember where it came from, maybe you know, but it's that frugality breeds resourcefulness, which I think is a great quote. And the frugality is inbuilt when you're starting off because of just the nature of the game pre-product market fifth and even, you know, pre-revenue or pre-profit.

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All the best. So yeah, I wonder the extent to which those constraints are drivers for flow in the early stages, even though they also obviously add pressure and stress and, you know, and challenge?

I think, at least in my experience, is limited resources are negatively correlated with— interesting, you know, because time is, is a factor, you know. I mean, if you just think of like the, the rest and recovery side, right, the parasympathetic side, if you're not if you're not providing yourself that, the chances of, you know, optimizing your performance are gonna decrease anyways. So if you have 26 hours of work to do in a 24-hour day, which is actually not an uncommon thing to hear and even to experience, the first thing you're gonna sacrifice is things like your rest, things like your free time. So I think the key thing is creating that culture and the preconditions early enough in the process that allow people to have more time and more space to work on optimizing themselves. So like what I do when I work with new startups, like before I even dig into the business model, like, you know, we start early on about how do you optimize the founders? You know, let's deal with the topics of wellbeing. You know, what does it mean to feel your best? What does it mean to perform your best? Because, you know, oftentimes like you're living your dream and I was an example of this, I was doing something that was absolutely my purpose, my dream, my mission in life. Like I lived for this. And over time, I was doing the thing that I love the most and I was profoundly unhappy because it was taking such a toll because I didn't prime the pump early enough to allow myself to operate in that context sustainably.

Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. It's interesting. I suppose the dichotomy that I'm trying to, you know, prod at is how do you build a culture around, you know, flow, recovery, well-being, psychological safety, etc., at scale with, you know, whilst, um, keeping performance, accountability, output equally equally high on the culture's priority list. And yeah, that's one of the things I've been thinking about a lot.

Yeah, I mean, you've got to provide people individual autonomy, right? I think if their motivation is such a key part of it, and I think motivation is maybe the thing that gets lost at scale. There's like so many of the greatest things in life get lost at scale. Democracy, gets lost at scale. Like autonomy in those conditions get lost at scale. The motivation, the drive, the purpose, the passion often decreases at scale. So that's why so many big companies want to act like startups. They try to create this kind of startup culture, the startup mentality, and some systems and processes. A bunch of entrepreneurship researchers call that ambidextrous organizations. How can they How can they like maintain their core competency and their core bottom line while still continuously innovating, iterating? And it's super duper difficult. And one of the main reasons is these organizations are made up of people. And, you know, there's a complacency that exists. They're just different people. You know, you can't say, hey, here's someone that's risk-averse and really just wants to work from 9 to 5 and get a paycheck. And then say, hey, we want you to, you know, shake things up, do something that could put your reputation or your career at risk, you know, could have a negative impact on what you do, when that's not who they are, you know. And I think in the end, we're really talking about different, different personas in these two contexts, you know. So, you know, if you want people to have autonomy, you want them to have, like, intrinsic motivation, then you need to find people that are intrinsically motivated about things like that. And the larger the organization you have, I think the less of those people you're going to have. So then you have to try to do it through different techniques, management strategies, and cultures, but it's not going to reach everybody. That's why I think the startup is such an interesting lab, because everybody is operating under the same conditions, under— on the same page, all towards the same kind of shorter-term shared goal, rather than, you know, an op— a large organization has multiple different targets that they're aiming for. Different business units are focused on different things, but when you're 5, 10, 15 people, you're all focused really on the same thing, and it allows for the creation of cultures that can be essentially universal in that organization, where I think in a larger organization, you can impact some, but there's some people you're just not going to be able to at all. Then again, I'm a startup guy, so I might be biased there.

Well, I don't think so. I mean, I think the startup culture and containers so powerful that even the biggest organizations on Earth use it to create innovation within the context of the bigger organizations. Like interestingly, Blockbuster, when they were going up against Netflix, separated out the digital video unit into its own startup, purposefully starved it of capital so that it would replicate a, you know, true startup context. And obviously Google X and those ventures do a very similar thing. It's very interesting as well I think what you mentioned about people, that's one of the things Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix or the co-founder of Netflix, really heavily emphasizes also is that yes, provide immense amounts of autonomy. Yes, provide freedom for recovery, all of those things fully to the extreme on the precondition and the assumption that you've got the right people in place. And I think that gets underemphasized within the context of, you know, change management and positive psychology and things like that. You've got to have incredible people in place who are A-players and intrinsically motivated before you can start pulling down all the structure, or I think at least there's a high likelihood you're not going to get the best results. And obviously in a startup context, you've already filtered for that by default. They wouldn't be in the accelerator They wouldn't be, you know, doing this if they weren't those people. Yeah.

I mean, there's a systemic challenge with that too. Like the bigger the organization gets, the more silo tasks that exist. Right. So bigger organizations have to fill roles. So if you look at the way companies hire nowadays, right, they're looking for people that have just the right skillset to perform a set task. Right. So they have the exact specialization that's needed to do to do this task or series of tasks most effectively. And that's why, like, even hiring in big companies is getting increasingly competitive, right? Because, you know, they're able— they're pulling from a bigger pool that's global, and they're able to find someone that fills those roles really effectively. They need to do that because they need— those roles are so siloed. In the startup, it's different. Almost everybody is wearing multiple hats. And once you've been a startup founder a few times, you learn that you don't hire for roles. If you hire for roles, you're setting yourself up for— to fill specific roles, you're setting yourself up for a disaster because the business is changing so much, and one role that's really relevant now might be obsolete and unnecessary in 6 months. So you're generally— if you do it well, you hire people and you try to create roles around their skill sets, or at least you hire people that are flexible, are more generalists or polymathic, or have multiple skill sets that they can navigate and move their way through the organization as the organization needs it. You don't— it's just harder to do that in a large organization because of the separated business units, because of the silo nature, and just simply because of scale, right? So these are very different personas that are in play in the first place. So I just think the context makes it incredibly different. I would love to, you know, I think you guys have probably, uh, a better bird's-eye view of how big companies are able to optimize for something like flow within the context of a really large organization effectively. But I think the— in a startup, doing it really, really early, building a culture around that stuff, I think if you started at the beginning and grow the organization based on some of those foundational principles and values, you're probably going to have a greater chance of success of that percolating through an organization as it grows, rather than trying to implement it later in the process, just in terms of reach across the organization.

All right, no, that makes, that makes total sense. I think the versatility thing is also just incredibly important at early stages. Interestingly, just this week, um, two members of our leadership team basically just fully switched responsibilities from the growth side of the organization through to the fulfillment side. And we were able to do a handover within one week without even additional training. And there's actually going to be very significant benefit to them taking ownership of those different sides of the organization due to the fresh eyes and different skill sets. But they've just got such kind of breadth and versatility and adaptability to be able to do that without any, you know, formal training or background or university degree in one of those sides. So yeah, I think that's, that's huge. So final question for you, Gary, before we close out here is a research genie question. If you could click your fingers and get the research immediately done, not just funded but completed, and for any question that you have with respect to flow or otherwise, what would that question be that you would want a fully academically validated answer for immediately?

I mean, at the meta level, it would be how do we get research out of academics' hands and into practitioners' brains? That's the first and foremost. You know, I am this, uh, this outlier lifelong entrepreneur in an academic environment, and I'm seeing like, oh, there's all this wealth of knowledge if you just spoke a different language, if you just presented it in a more palatable way, if you just were customer-centric. If you think of, hey, I'm researching entrepreneurship, my customer is the entrepreneur, I'm going to create an output in their language in the most palatable way for them. Hallelujah! That would be the greatest thing that could happen with the research side of things. But I think like for me personally, in terms of flow, like the problem The challenge, the missing link that I'm really interested in is how do we get away from flow as a psychological construct alone? And how can we actually effectively physiologically measure it? If there is one biomarker, amazing. If we could just say, hey, now we can literally identify when flow happens. If somehow like, you know, a transition to dopamine and anandamide was just like Boom, that's 100% clear. That would be amazing if we could find a cascade or something along those lines of neuroelectricity and neurochemistry. Then we can start using technology to operationalize it and really be able to reach people. In the end, science, I love science, it's amazing, but science doesn't become incredible to me until people can actually use it to make their lives better. So the great thing is, is I think we're really damn close. I think we're— I mean, not only in our lifetimes, but I think maybe even in the next decade or so, all of these things are starting to line up. There are foundational technologies in place, whether it's with sensors or with machine learning or with other biometric technologies that are coming out there. We're on the cusp of unlocking this stuff. And it's It's for someone that's interested in optimal performance and performance science. It's a pretty exciting time to be alive because the tech is coming into play and, you know, our knowledge base is getting ready to explode.

I love it. Yeah, it's super, super exciting time. Where can folks find out more about your work, Garrett, and help support?

Um, yeah, I'm not, uh, I don't have a lot of plugs. Um, I share a little bit of what I'm doing on LinkedIn. I'm an open book on LinkedIn. Garrett McGowan. You do have a website for the study, flowphysiology.com. Um, we'll eventually be updating it a little bit more when we're not, uh, neck deep in data collection. Yeah, those are probably the best places right now.

Great. Well, thanks a ton. Keep up the great work, and hopefully we'll do a second round soon.

Thanks, Ryan. It was always a pleasure. Love talking about this stuff with you. Thanks.

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