Strategies for Lifelong Growth and Fulfillment

I'm just curious to how you got into this world and how you came all the way up to being motivated to this book.

If you talk to people about peak performance, you'd hear a lot about good upbringing, good childhood, the right schools, the right mom, the right— all this stuff. And this is what really caught my attention. All the folks I knew, they had horrific childhoods. Why is this happening? Obviously, the answer involves flow states. Flow underpins happiness, well-being, overall life satisfaction, meaning, and purpose. So flow literally is the most addictive state on Earth. Because you're always advancing your skills leads forwards into the future and where you want to go. Everybody can get into flow. It's actually universal. Most people don't realize flow is not a singular experience. It's a spectrum of experiences. In our 50s, we get access to new levels of intelligence. So big picture thinking starts to really increase in our 50s. Old dogs are actually better at learning a whole bunch of different kinds of tricks than younger dogs. Like, you've just got more brain power. 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 your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Doris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

I mean, obviously you got a body of work. I mean, you know, you could talk— I mean, the Flow Research Collective, all the stuff that you get into, it— for me, all your body of work seems very much like one is an obvious extension of the previous. And it's just, for me anyway, just looking at it from the outside looking in. But I'm just curious to how you got into this world and how you came all the way up to being motivated to this book.

So, I came into peak performance in general in the '90s. I started my career as a journalist, and journalism is this sort of wonderful career where they they pay you to be curious. And the two things I was most curious about— human performance, and really just how do we work, right? And I— what was different about my curiosity is, and I got very lucky, in the, in the early '90s, neuroscience was going through like a phase transition, and we had gone from caring about like, what is this cluster of neurons in the back of the brain doing, and to saying things like, well, how do emotions work, What is consciousness? What are altered states of consciousness, which flow is, right? So like the questions that I've spent my career on, suddenly neuroscience had these answers for, and I was very dissatisfied with psychological answers. They were squishy, they were subjective, there was endless arguing, and I wanted something that was like reliable, repeatable, and neuroscience is mechanism and it's shared by everyone. So it was my way in and The second thing I was interested in, and this is probably more relevant to this discussion, was action sports— surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboard, and the like. And if you know anything about these sports in the '90s, the '90s is described as the era of impossible, more impossible feats, things that had never been done, were never going to be done, get done than ever before. And it's a wild time where like somebody will do something on a Monday that's never been done before, and by like Wednesday, somebody else is building in on it, and by Friday, they've built further. And it's like this iteration on impossible is happening all across action sports. And I had a front row seat. I was living in these communities, these were my friends. And, you know, I always say it's a very different world when you, like, you, you, you see Laird Hamilton on a screen surfing Jaws and you see a 50-foot wave, than when you, like, go drinking with your buddies on a Friday night and then Saturday morning you're hungover and you all go into the mountains together and then your friend does something that for all of recorded history people have believed impossible, right? That's a very different perspective. And the second part of is I knew enough about peak performance. In the '90s, if you talked to people about peak performance, you'd hear a lot about good upbringing, good childhood, the right schools, the right mom, the right, all this stuff. And all the folks I knew defied this. And this is what really caught my attention. All the folks I knew, they had horrific childhoods, most like broken homes, bad upbringings. They had very little education. They had almost no money. There's tons of risk-taking in these communities and a lot of substance abuse. And if you put those things together in communities, People die young or go to jail. They don't reinvent what's possible for the human species. And that was where it started. So how is this happening? Why is this happening? Obviously, the answer involves flow states, which was at the center of my work. And that was sort of where it started. In the beginning, I was exploring it as a journalist and a columnist. Then I was exploring these questions deeper in books. Now with the Flow Research Collective, you know, we have a huge research division and we do work with folks at USC and UCLA and Stanford and UC Davis. And we publish our research in major neuroscience journals and that sort of stuff. So it's, you know, the style of research has changed. So the language I write in about the research has become, I think, way more precise over time. But it's sort of still the same kind of quest. And in our country, the most recent one is, the book goes from peak performance into peak performance aging. And the sort of like the through line, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the godfather of flow psychology. We're going to talk a lot about flow. So, let me just define it for anybody who doesn't happen to know what flow state is. So, flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness, a state of consciousness we feel our best, we perform our best. More specifically, it's those moments of rapt attention, total absorption, get so focused on what you're doing. Everything else just melts away, starts to disappear, and all aspects of performance, mental and physical, go through the roof. And so I work on how that happens in the body and the brain. And one of the things that we know about how flow happens is flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. So if you want more flow in your life, these triggers are your toolkit. And the most famous one is known as the challenge-skill balance. So the idea here is Flow follows focus. It can only show up when all of our attention is in the right here, right now. Turns out we pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. So, you want to stretch but not snap, always challenging yourself, always learning, always growing. So, Csikszentmihalyi argued— okay, one more detail. When we talk about flow as peak performance, it's total optimal performance, including skills that you wouldn't normally add in. In flow, we are more empathetic. We're wiser, those kinds of skills. And flow over time makes us more empathetic and increases wisdom. So Csikszentmihalyi argued that flow is the actual driver of adult development. It's how we mature, it's how we grow over time, because on the other side of a flow state, you're more complex, you're more adaptable, you've learned something new, you've got a little wiser, a little more empathetic. And flow is usually a signal of skill mastery. So you're, you're advancing, right? And he said he thinks it's the main driver of adult development. he passed away a couple years ago, so I can't— and we can't actually bring this up and talk to him about it anymore. I think it's one of a bunch of drivers of adult development. I don't think— I think it's the most important one perhaps, but there's other stuff going on. We can argue over that. But, my work in peak performance sort of rolled right into peak performance aging. And simultaneously, I don't know if you know this or not, my wife and I have spent 20 years doing hospice care work for very old dogs. We run a hospice care dog sanctuary in Havre for 20 years, and we've developed a very, very successful healing protocol built on flow science, some of these other ideas. And our dogs are like the worst. We specialize in the worst of the worst. So if you like, you're a late elderly Chihuahua with an abusive past, bladder problems, bowel problems, one eye, three legs, cancer, heart disease, and flatulence. You are our dog. Right? Like, that's what we do. And these dogs all get checked out by vets, and the vets will say things like, don't get attached. This dog is going to be dead in a month. Your job here is a very good death. That's all we're doing here. And yet these dogs, and over the years, 700 dogs passed through our facility and another 5,000 in the outreach programs. We would, our program was working so well, these dogs would live 4, 5, 6 more years. And you start turning that into human years. You're like, holy shit, that's a lot more life.

A lot more life.

Why is this happening? Is it possible in humans? All these sort of things come together and sort of lead into what becomes in our country.

Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. And you said so many different things that, you know, we don't obviously have time to dig into all the— I guess flow triggers, right? Because you touched on that. And I had a note here saying, is everybody— so those are the preconditions by which that allow flow unit to enter the conditions that to create flow, right? So, can anyone get into that state? Are there some people just better, or can they get to that state easier, or is it a biological component?

You're talking about what scientists call flow proneness. And certain people are more flow prone than others. And there are certain behavioral things, non-flow triggers. For example, we did a bunch of work with Dr. Glenn Fox, who's a neuroscientist at USC who specializes in gratitude. And we discovered that people who have regular gratitude practices, because gratitude calms down the nervous system so much, it's easier to get into that challenge-skill balance. So people with regular gratitude practice are more flow-prone. That's one example. There's a bunch of different neurobiological examples. And the other thing that nobody talks about is your flow-proneness also correlates with what triggers you might get into. So let me give you a sports example. There are endurance athletes who ride like runners high into flow. They're riding the anandamide and the endorphins that underpin flow, the pain relief. And, that pain relief tends to show up after 6 hours of exercise, 5 hours of exercise. You get these long-time endurance athletes, whereas I tend to ride the dopamine drivers in flow. So, novelty, creativity, unpredictability, risk. And, those are very quick and they can happen very, very quickly for people. But, for people who are really wired for endurance sports, you'll also So, in the S&M community, there's an S&M-based flow state known as flying, and it's a pain-induced flow state. It's the exact same flow state as endurance athletes are seeking. It's the same neurobiology on the front end. And, that seems to take a little longer for people usually or require kind of a more intense experience, I think, is what we learned from the S&M community a little bit, but I'm not a sex researcher, so I can't really speak to that too much.

I was going to say, did you say S&M?

Yeah.

So, you did.

Okay, got it.

Yeah, yeah.

In my book Stealing Fire, we talk about the overlap with certain sexual practices in altered states because there's a lot of overlap in the brain between what happens in a flow state, what happens in traumatic stress, what happens in a psychedelic experience, what happens— like, all these altered states of consciousness share a lot of commonalities. And so one of the ways we study these things is through comparative altered states, basically.

Interesting. Yeah, because the brain doesn't really know the context, right? I think by the chemical— I would imagine the chemical release is sort of similar in different ratios based on the different context, whether it's sex, whether it's other things you're talking about. So it's almost like it could boil it down to—

and so like one of the things that happens in flow is the prefrontal cortex deactivates. This happens in almost all altered states. This is the part of the brain that does sense of self, does time. Why does time pass strangely in altered states? Because time's a calculation performed all over the prefrontal cortex. The network goes down, you can't— you lose track of time. You lose your sense of self. That's all these things. And that's common in a lot of altered states, right? And we can get sort of, we know very like more specific. There's like, there's whole teams of guys. My favorite is Moshe Adel and Shahar Arzi. So Moshe Adel is the world's leading Kabbalah expert. And Shahar Arzi is a neuroscientist at the University of, I want to say Jerusalem. And he, so Moshe Adel will come to him and be like, hey, in the Kabbalah it says if you do X, Y, and Z, This is what happens. And then they'll go into a scanner, an fMRI, and they'll like test it and see what's actually producing. They figured out one of the things in Kabbalah, unlike a lot, you can produce the doppelganger effect using a very, so you can see yourself and ask yourself questions and blah, blah, blah. But it's literally, there's the opposite of an out-of-body experience. In an out-of-body experience, you feel like your consciousness is leaving, but your body is staying. Here, your body is leaving, but your consciousness stays. And it's all the same part of the brain. It's the temporal parietal junction that does perspective. And it does both physical perspective, where are you looking at something from, and psychological perspective. So when you say people are more empathetic, they can see things from more sides. It's this part of the brain that gets really active. It's active in flow. It's why flow expands empathy. Out-of-body experiences are, among many other things, they're extreme. You're in a life-threatening situation and your brain goes, oh, shit, let's change the perspective radically in a second to see if we can save your life, right? First time I had an out-of-body experience— and they're really common, they show up in like 20% of the population, um, have them— but, uh, I went skydiving and I jumped out of the plane and jumped right out of my body, and I was watching my body fall. I was like, what? I was 18.

I didn't know about any of this stuff.

I didn't know what was going on. I thought I was dying, right? Like, and that was part of like where some of these questions first arose for me. Because I was 17 years old when I had that experience. And what the hell caused that, right? I wasn't very religiously inclined. I wasn't very— I was like, what the hell was that? And why was that? And, you know, now we know exactly, and we can reproduce it in the lab and things like that. It's neat.

Interesting. Another interesting— going back to the chemical thing, I think you said flow is the only time you get all of those, you know, the dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins all at the same time.

Is that Yeah, so, um, so there's ways— look, there are a couple hundred neurochemicals in the brain. We understand like 15 of them, first of all. So there's way more going on than just that. And we certainly know a bunch of neurochemicals that you didn't name— glutamate, GABA, acetylcholine— like, they're involved too. But the big 5 you named are all pleasure chemicals. And flow does appear to be the only time you get all 5 at once. And to put these in context, just so you understand how pleasurable talking about romantic love. We've all fallen in love. It's a very potent high. That's dopamine and norepinephrine mixed together. So, flow is dopamine, norepinephrine, plus 3 other pleasure chemicals, including dopamine, which may be the most potent of all of pleasure chemicals and is definitely the most addictive or one of the most addictive. And endorphins, not dopamine, endorphins, which are— there are about 20 different endorphins in the brain. These are those painkillers I was talking about. The most common is 100 more times potent than medical morphine. So it's the same chemical. It's endorphins or internal opiates, like external opiates, morphine, heroin, those sorts of things. And our internal one, the most common one, is 100 times more potent than morphine, just to give you an idea of how pleasurable these chemicals are. And so what does this translate to in the real world in a behavior sense, in a psychological sense? One of the most well-established facts in psychology is that flow underpins happiness. Well-being, overall life satisfaction, meaning, and purpose. The people who score off the charts for all those things are the people with the most flow in your lives. And, if you want to kick ass until you kick the bucket, regular access to flow is really crucial. In fact, the last study Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did before he died was on flow proneness over time. And, he wanted to know, does it drop off at any point? And, what he found is the only time flow proneness goes away is if you start losing physical functionality. If you can't do the things that you used to do to get into flow, flow proneness diminishes. But in his study, it was like late 80s is when it was showing up. And that was as far as the study went, right? They didn't— they're not tons of 90-year-olds running around volunteering for studies. So like, that's about our— most of our data ends in the 80s.

Well, that was interesting. It was a little heartbreaking too. I heard you tell a story. I don't know if it was on a podcast or YouTube. I forget where it was, but you had called him And I think he told you to have a backup plan because he—

yes, but this is— so where did our country come from? Where did my book on peak performance aging come from? So we've been talking about, like, I've been looking at the flow stuff and I was looking at the dog stuff and whatever. And so what did we learn just previously to, like, where I get involved in this more actively is the traditional idea of aging is the long, slow rot theory. It's all of our physical and mental skills decline over time. There's nothing we can do Stop the slide, right? And that notion, it had been floating around for decades and centuries, but Freud codifies it. He writes something down in about 1904 that sort of locks that into stone. And all we do over the 20th century is prove Freud right, like in great detail. And then in the '90s, holes start showing up in all these theories. Everywhere we look, there's new holes and new holes. And we now know 25, 30 years later that Freud was totally wrong. The long slow rot theory is totally wrong. And it turns out that all the skills that we thought declined over time, they're use it or lose it skills. And if we never stop using them, we can hold on to them, even advance them far later into life than ever thought possible. Then I had this conversation with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Mike, it's the last, it was the last conversation. He died during COVID And, uh, it was the last time we got to talk. And I literally— I called him up, uh, he— so he's a— he's been a lifelong outdoor athlete. He was a— he was a hiker, avid hiker, mountaineer, rock climber. And he really, like, he knew some hardcore rock climbers, like he knew their names, and like he was much more involved. And I— and I called him up, um, just— I just wanted to know. You never really talk about your action sports background. Like, you talk about the artists, you talk about time in concentration camp, you just never addressed this. It's not It's in like these weird interviews you gave that are translated out of Italian, and that's how I know about a lot of this stuff, and through talking to you and your friends. But like, it's nowhere in the work. I want to know how action sports influenced the work. I mean, obviously my work has been shaped by it. So it's a— and there's this huge pause, like, and I think I've offended him. And I mean, like, a minute goes by and 2 minutes go by, and I'm like, of all the things, of all the people in the world I want to offend, Chick Send Me High is probably like the top of the list I'd like to avoid, right? Like literally like, oh my God. Also, because like this dude starts saying unkind things about me. I think my career as a researcher goes away, right? On top of everything else. And we've always gotten along. And so there's this huge pause and he suddenly says, well, Stephen, you got to be careful. And at that point I thought he had lost, like I knew he'd had a stroke. He was in his 80s. And I thought I was like, oh shit, he's lost the plot. Like, he doesn't actually know what we're talking about. And I was like, well, Mike asked me to call Mike. It wasn't me. Hi, I'm from Haley. I said, well, I'm like, what are you talking about? I got to be careful. You know, what do you mean? He's like, yeah, man, you do something your whole life for flow and then you get to be my age and forget about climbing rocks or climbing mountains. I can barely get out of bed most days. You got to have a backup plan. You got to be careful. And what he was telling me, it was— this is— was— this was not like— this was one flow junkie to another, right? This guy was saying, look, man, like, if you've— like, as you get older, you want as many ways into flow as possible because it's so important. And that's what he was telling me. And don't just depend on one thing. So I— that then led me to say, okay, if this is my backup plan, I took all these ideas and I said, if this is true, I should be able to onboard difficult physical skills even in my 50s. And I decided to learn to park ski. There were a bunch of reasons, but essentially I was a big mountain guy, right? You know, big mountain guy means you're like risk and now you're pushing farther and farther out there. You're skiing bigger and bigger lines. And that was how I got into flow. And I was, I was like, Mike's right. Like, this is like what I want to do for the rest of my life with all my spare time. And if this is my only way into flow, I'm going to die or I'm going to get locked out. Right. This is stupid. And I knew creativity is a flow trigger. Pattern recognition is a flow trigger. When you link ideas together, when a skier looks at a snowbank and goes, oh, I could use that to throw a 180 or do a grind across it. That's pattern recognition. So I knew if I could teach myself how to park ski, while the learning might be dangerous, once I got there, I would have a million more creative entrances into flow because I could creatively interpret terrain features and I could go mellow pattern recognition, mellow pattern recognition, mellow pattern recognition, and 3 in a row or 4 in a row produces as much dopamine as taking a big risk and hucking a 25-foot cliff, which is the thing I probably don't want to, you know, always have to do for flow. There might be days I might, you know what I mean? But like, if that— and it so resonated with me because I had hurt myself a number of times really early season before like the whole mountain had opened up, chasing flow by speed, like trying to ski faster and faster and faster. And there's a million— you know, it's early season, so like only the beginner runs are open, and there's a million people, and suddenly you're playing dodgeball at 60 miles an hour. And that's just dumb, right? It's just dumb. But that's what flow junkies do. Um, and so I was like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna And, you know, it turned out, um, the way I taught, I chose like the— it worked, right? And I learned— I thought if it took 5 years, who cares? Great, like it's a backup plan. But I did it in a— I created this new learning theory and we did it in a season. And then my ski partner was using the same ideas and he went incredibly fast, incredibly far. And then we went back the next year and took 20 older adults and used the same idea and taught them how to park ski park snowboard in like 4 days on the mountain, ridiculously compressed time. Same results, same kind of really accelerated learning and like a safe progression. Because it was really also about like the one thing that is true, older adults take longer to heal than, than younger adults. And that's still true. It'll— as the stem cell work progresses, so over the next 5, 6 years, that's probably not going to stay true. Because we're going to— we're very close to solving that particular issue. That said, it's still an issue. And even though regenerative medicine for ligaments, for bones and tendons and ligaments, three words that I couldn't say, we've gotten really good. Like the medicine is really good and we can usually fix most things. So a lot of the problems of aging medically are going to sort of start to decline in that way. We're still not at like, you know, we— you still want to stay safe.

And so we felt you didn't do a great job of staying safe with all doers. What did you—

broke what?

How many? There was some list I saw that you had broken. I don't know, everything.

Well, I— so one, that you— I have broken 87 bones, but there's a caveat here. 65 of them were hairline fractures in my legs. My legs sort of spiderwebbed over time. My knees didn't fold properly. So every time I skied bumps, I'd put a hairline, right? And I didn't know. And suddenly, like, all my legs gave out at once. And like, the doctor came out and he was like, your legs look like spider webs. And I was like, oh shit. He's like, I counted 65. Like, oh, but so a lot of those took place all at that one time. And yeah, I've broken a lot of bones, but I did not break anything during this experiment.

Huh.

That was the other thing is like, and even the injuries I got in the book, The only— the biggest injury I got happened because a guy skied into me and we were in the big mountains. We weren't anywhere near the terrain park. And it was, you know, and I, you know, do you— freak shit is going to happen. Well, yeah. So I don't like that one. Doesn't count. It's— I mean, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

40 years, 50 or 40 years of skiing. That's happened one other time.

We see flow junkies. I mean, you know, I was born in the '70s and '80s. It was always adrenaline junkies.

Is Is because nobody's an adrenaline junkie. Adrenaline's— first of all, it's not addictive at all. It's a horribly unpleasant sensation. Nobody likes the feeling of adrenaline in there.

That's when you drive by like a state trooper.

A little, a little bit is exciting, a little, but right, you get, you get that like near me.

Yeah, yeah, that's— you don't like that. Okay.

Yeah, nobody's addicted to adrenaline. It's a total misnomer, right? Um, it's— you, you get a little bit of adrenaline, like, so there's a lot of work, and we've done some of this work that you may need to trigger the fight response, the front end of a flow state, even if it's a cognitive flow state, even if you're playing the guitar, you may come to like a difficult lick where you have to like lean in for a minute and like, ah, and you, and in that moment, you get a little adrenaline, noradrenaline, right? The brain's version of it and a little testosterone perhaps. And that seems to help drive focus, like really concentrate focus. But Other than that, the adrenaline, the term is a total misnomer. It's gone away. And flow junkie. So flow literally is the most— it's known as the most addictive state on earth, right? It's just as Chicks at Me High Once said, he's like, look, every other addiction leads backwards. Flow, because you're always advancing your skills, leads forwards into the future and where you want to go. But it's still— and if in my book, The Rise of Superman, I have a whole chapter on the dark side of flow. I'm like, You're dealing with very addictive neurochemistry. And the Flow Research Collective, when we train people, you have to train people in for how to do this because like if you, if you're doing something that's creating a ton of flow, give you a simple example from entrepreneurship, launching a startup creates a ton of flow, right? Group flow happens almost on a daily basis. Company gets launched and then it's the same thing every day and it's not as flowy. And for the entrepreneurs on top, it gets boring because they're flow junkies and they go start a new company, right? This is, this, this is what happens with, you know, serial entrepreneurs. And I say this, you know, Peter Diamandis has been my writing partner. I think, like, I've, I've been involved in 22 startups, so I'm bad, but I think he's up around 35 or 37. I mean, like, his number is crazy.

Yeah, well, everything you're saying, and I got like, does it— as stoked as I was on all these topics. You know, I did, and this is more of a macro comment on society basically, and it's like, so, you know, I, I get some comments sometimes like, well, a lot of the folks you talk about, you know, oh, well, he's probably doesn't have kids, he's probably young. I'm not saying you specifically, but a lot of these people that are ex, you know, they're in life situations where they can choose creative endeavors. Well, I'm a stay-at-home mom with two kids and I have to do work I hate. Flow is not something, you know, it's almost like Yeah. So I don't—

let me, let me, let me just speak to that first. So at the Flow Research Collective, we train people and we work in 130 countries and we train everybody from stay-at-home moms to soccer moms to, you know, insurance brokers to guys who have jobs they don't love to like C-suite executives to— we train Bain Capital, Facebook, Audi, Accenture. The San Francisco Police Department, the Air Force. I mean, like a wide, huge swatch of people and tens of thousands a month. And peak performance is for everyone. We are all hardwired biologically. Okay, let me— definition of terms. Peak performance is nothing more or less than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. Peak performance aging, getting our biology to work for us rather than against us when applied to the opportunities and challenges of aging. That's all we're talking about here. But we share the same biology. Everybody can get into flow. It's universal in humans. It's actually universal in mammals. Like, I got my dogs into flow.

Dogs, any social mammal, right? Yeah, yeah, right.

Any social animal. Yeah, yeah. I mean, by the way, um, it's because ferrets can't produce anandamide. That was the test, okay? They put— they taught a bunch of— they taught humans, dogs, and ferrets to run on a treadmill and then ran them into runners' side. And then they measure— they took blood and ferrets couldn't produce anandamide, one of the chemicals that underpin flow. And that's why they said that's one of the dividing lines. Now I have to say that I don't think that's true because the endocannabinoid system, which produces anandamide, is ancient and shows up in almost all mammals. So I think something was wrong in the experiment, not in the— like, the science doesn't make any sense to me, but whatever. That's super geeky.

Yeah, yeah, I apologize. But it seems like flow is an absolute It sounds like hyperbole here, but flow, I mean, is sort of a cure for— I feel like it's a natural Adderall or a natural insert your amazing brain focus drug here. And it's like all of our addictions, alcohol, drug use, depression, it almost seems like it's—

Look at the numbers. So we've got studies on what flow amplifies and how much and productivity. McKinsey did a 10-year study. It's 500% above baseline. Baseline. Creativity is 400 to 700% depending on whose numbers you're looking at. The Department of Defense looked at soldiers and flow and learning rates, and they were 250 to 500% faster than normal. The physical side— strength goes up, stamina goes up, fast-twitch muscle response goes up, pain sensitivity goes down. This is optimal performance. The, the thing about it is, and I talk about this in Art Impossible, so you gotta— to understand why does flow optimize so many things, evolution And the reason is this. So scarcity drives evolution. There are two reactions to scarcity. You can fight or flee or, right, or freeze, but you can fight over dwindling resources, right? Or get together, get creative, get cooperative, and make new resources. So what does flow amplify? Everything you need to fight, flee, or get creative, get cooperative, learn a bunch of stuff, and make new resources. That's—

and thus survive more.

Survive, right? So like, that's where— like, that's what it is, that's what it comes from, and that's why it optimizes so many different things, because it's, it's built specifically for our survival. And, you know, and the hunt for resources demands a lot of like creativity and innovation and, you know, physical skills and pathfinding, all that, you know, everything.

Yeah, yeah, everything you need. Yeah.

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

All the best.

Yeah. Now what, what is the I drew a little like a graph. I'm very visually oriented. It's like, it's like there's a physical and a mental component to this. Someone like, going back to, to, um, and I wrote his name down just so folks know, Mihai Cikset. Mihai, did I say that correctly? I don't want to butcher his name.

And I— yep, you got it.

He deserves the, you know, the respect of a well-pronounced name, but it's a complicated one, dude. But he asked you to call him Mike, so that's, that's, that's pretty kind of him. But, um, but no, anyway, so he was obviously getting to the point where his physical body was not responding anymore. So how does someone that I'm a software engineer by day. And I wrote down a bunch of things when I felt like I was absolutely in flow. And a lot of it was physical. Like what I remember, I used to play baseball and I remember being in, I was a kid and I don't know what it was, but I was playing third base, throwing absolute laser beams to first base, like 30 in a row that was so, I don't know what it was. I was at college one time, and I'm not a great, I'm not a specialist in any sport. I just enjoyed them and I was kind of okay at pretty much all of them. But never great. I hit 11 3-pointers, 9, 10, or 11. I never remember the number, 3-pointers in a row. And that's not me. I don't do that. And it was just like, to your point, everything else went away. I didn't see or hear anything. I could see the ball going through the net. Everything was working. But then also, I remember times where I was just writing software and it was working.

And I guess writing software, I mean, by the— so the cats who wrote PeopleSoft, Tim Lester, and I can't remember, which is like the coder Bible.

Yeah.

Talk a lot about coding and flow, and there's like really cool studies on coders and flow. So yeah, like one, Chick Set Me High and myself sort of did the field of service because we're probably the two largest, you know, people know about flow because of Mike and me as a general rule. And we both focused a lot on artists and action sport athletes because the stories are good and But it turns out, you know, some of Mike's earliest research showed up, shows that the most common flow states on Earth are things like reading. There's— so there's group flow, team flow, team performing at their best. And the most common— and there's— comes in varieties. Interpersonal flow is just two people talking and you get so sucked into the conversation, a couple of hours go by. And the most common flow state on Earth is two middle managers talking at work. In interpersonal flow. That's really common as well. So the thing that's different— and so why does your baseball experience stand out so much as opposed to these other flow states? And this is part of the answer to your question. This is what most people don't realize. Flow is not a singular experience. It's a spectrum of experiences, like much like any emotion. So anger— I'm a little irked, homicidally murderous— it's still anger, right? It's a spectrum of experience. So flow is defined psychologically by 6 core characteristics: complete concentration on the task at hand, merger of action awareness, the vanishing of self, time passing strangely, autotelic, which is a fancy word for joyous, ecstatic, overwhelming. It means an end in itself. Once we will do something that produces flow simply for the sheer enjoyment of getting into flow, doing it right. We don't need other motivation. That's autotelic. And then the final one is a sense of control. And that's literally the internal experience of peak performance. We don't experience peak performance. We experience, oh my God, I can control things. I can't— my skis are doing things my skis don't normally do. Your baseball was doing things right. That's that sense of control you're talking about. But it could be cognitive. It could be me as a writer. Like, my sentences are doing really amazing things at 6 AM on a Tuesday. And, you know, maybe this doesn't happen every Tuesday at 6 AM, but today— but the Point is, microflow is when those characteristics show up, but they're like at 1 or 2. This is, you go to work, you sit down to write a quick email to a colleague, you get so sucked in, you write an essay and bodily awareness disappears. And like maybe your sense of self isn't totally gone, but bodily awareness is gone. When you pop back into consciousness, like an hour's gone by and you're like, oh shit, I got to run to the bathroom. That happens to all of us every day. Like that's almost a daily experience. That's microflow. Macro flow is the other end of the spectrum. It's, I can't— I'm shooting, you know, 3-pointer after 3-pointer and I can't miss. And that was often for a really long time until the '50s, people thought it was a spiritual experience. It only showed up, or mystical experience. It only showed up in religious and spiritual people. And then Abraham Maslow found it. He was doing a huge study on successful people and he found that all successful people had found ways to alter their consciousness and get into flow and use— so flow is the commonality. The other commonality was everybody's— the study group, random, they were all atheists. Everybody. It was like hundreds of people. They were all atheists because he was like studying top intellectuals, Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt. And like, they just didn't believe in God. And as a result, mystical experiences were out. Maslow renames them peak experiences. Chick Settmeier renames peak experiences flow. And for And the reason is he's running around the world talking about these peak experiences. When are you at your best? When you feel your best. Everybody says the same thing. Hey, when I'm at my best, I'm in this altered state. I don't know what happens, but every decision, every action seems to flow seamlessly, perfectly, effortlessly from the last. And so like he heard the term flow in like 40 countries and finally was like, okay, that's what we're going to call it. You know, that's where it comes from. But it also describes how the experience makes us feel, right? Flow feels flowy, which is cool, right? When every action, decision, right? And it also gives you a look at like one of the things that flow does. It's high-speed, near-perfect decision-making. Yeah, near-perfect being the operative term, right? Because you can, you can make mistakes in flow for sure, um, but, uh, you're going to be as good as you possibly can be.

Yeah, yeah. It's like the resistance is— it's like the resistance just goes away. The typical resistance you feel on every level just seems to diminish.

Yeah, that's the diminishment of self. That's that the medial prefrontal cortex, which is your default mode network, all that stuff just gets really freaking quiet. So what happens? Risk-taking goes away. Creativity, right? You're no longer doubting all your neat ideas. Like, you're willing to consider all them. Open-mindedness, openness to experience, and all these traits. So openness to experience, for example, for peak performance aging becomes really critical. This is weird. This is a random one, but it's just really strange. They were asking about major personality traits, of which openness to experience is one, like the Big Five, right? And they like correlation to health and mortality and longevity and those kinds of questions. And turns out, for like happiness over time, they all play a role, but only openness to experience correlates with mortality. And it's wild, but like, if people get very close to experiences, they're likely to die within a year. It's the craziest correlation. You're like, okay, stay curious, people. Stay curious.

Interesting, huh? Very interesting. Now, getting back more, because obviously flow underpins your book, but, but, but the other aspect of your book is that, hey, this stuff doesn't atrophy as you get old. It's illusory, like we normally think. If you just sit there and, and, and, and if you want to fight it, it's going to absolutely— you know, your brain— because I always think, okay, brain elasticity goes down and you just, you and you just sort of feel—

doesn't— I mean, it does, right? So, and that's—

I think we are disproving that, correct?

We actually gain a whole bunch of cognitive abilities in our 50s. That's the whole crazy thing. There are certain things in the brain that decline over time, and they fall into a series of different categories. There's stuff that declines over time, and there's nothing we can do about it, and we wish we could, like white matter size decreases over time, and it— and there's a bunch of problems that may have to do with bone density. The cutting edge of brain health is bone health, um, because the bones are like the mineral factory for the body. All your nutrients, all your minerals are stored in your bone, and the brain runs on calcium, among many other things, which is stored in the bone. So if bone density goes down over time, that could be a lot of the cognitive stuff stuff. But as a general rule, there's stuff that's— there's a few things that go down over time, and there's not much we can do about it. But most everything else is a use-it-or-lose-it skill. Then there's a bunch of stuff that we used to think declined over time, but we now know it's trainable in like weird ways. Um, I'll give you a great example. I do a lot of work with, uh, Dr. Adam Gasali. He's a neuroscientist at University of California, San Francisco. Brilliant. And So, one of the things that goes down in older people is task switching, the ability to go from task to task, right? They get lost and confused. And he built— he was on the COVID of Nature, the top science journal in the world, 5 years ago for a video game that he designed. And it's the first video game that's been approved by the FDA to treat disease, and it treats cognitive decline in older adults, and it works specifically on task switching. And you can literally like play this video game 20 minutes a day, 3 times a week for about 6 weeks, and it will reset your brain from tests, which is a couple other things, from a 60-year-old to a 20-year-old. So, there's stuff where we've got like really cutting-edge stuff for it. And then, there's a whole bunch of stuff we were just wrong about. And there's all these superpowers that come online in our 50s. Some of it's genetic. Certain genes only activate with experience. Some of it is the two halves of the brain start working together really well in our 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. Keeps going. And sometimes the brain starts to utilize under-recruited regions. So like any open space, the brain says, oh, you know, you're 50 years old, we can start colonizing this. You're not going to need it for that. And we can use it for this. And as a result, in our 50s, we get access to new levels of intelligence. Like 3 new thinking styles start to come online that are really critical. Relativistic thinking, systems thinking. So big picture thinking starts to really increase in our 50s. Empathy goes up, wisdom goes up, creativity, including divergent thinking. Like, the hardest aspect of creativity to train is like the outside-the-box, wild, disparate connections between ideas, and it naturally starts to increase in our 50s. So like, the old idea— the old— you can't teach an old dog new tricks— that actually goes back to Freud. Freud said old people are no longer educable. That's literally where that dates to. And it— but it turns out old dogs are actually better at learning a whole bunch of different kinds of tricks than younger dogs. Like you've just got more brain power. So yeah, there's some stuff that like goes away, but if you were training the brain right and the body right, the stuff that you, that, that really starts to come online is kind of amazing. And we're not utilizing it because we've got all these mistaken assumptions about what it means to be the second half of our lives.

Encouraging. I mean, if nothing else, that's, you know, it's encouraging. And you do hear a lot, a lot of reading I do is you start to, you know, I think a lot of things have sort of urban legend, myth, whatever, you know, most entrepreneurs, successful ones start in their 40s or whatever, like most startups, like it's not the 22-year-old or 21-year-old Silicon Valley.

And if you, yeah, if you look, I was just trying to study about this, historians, yeah, peak in their 70s, writers peak in their 60s. And I mean, like, you go start going through the list. I— the point I make, which is a business case in a sense, in the book, is— so I wrote a book called Bold, which was about, you know, applying some of the flow ideas and a bunch of, like, tech ideas. And it was about entrepreneurship, right? And so after Bold came out, I spent, God, years talking to CEOs. And all— for whatever reason, maybe it was me, I don't know what it was— we would always end up talking about hiring and training, which I think are, you know, for most people running companies are two really big issues. And I heard the same thing over and over and over again, is that in the 21st century, I need two skill sets in my employees more than I need anything else. And they were, I need intelligence, creativity, and innovation because I got to— everything's moving so damn fast. I have to be able to out-innovate the competition and stay ahead. And all that stuff. And the second thing is I need empathy and wisdom because I like— one, psychological safety matters, and you can't have psychological safety without empathy or wisdom. Team performance matters, right? Every company is run by teams, and without empathy and wisdom, you don't have high-performing teams. But the mantra— and I think we have Jeff Bezos to thank for this one— of 21st century business is customer-centric thinking. And if you're not empathetic or wise, Nobody can think like your customers. So, when you look at these things, I'm like, "Wait a minute, these are the things that come online in your 50s." This is exactly what we're getting. Now, it doesn't mean you want to hire every person. There's a— I always, in the book, I say, if you add it all up, peak performance aging in a single sentence is, if you want to really rock till you drop, you want to engage in challenging, creative, and social activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. Environments. That's peak performance aging. Perfect. Yeah, there's some lifestyle stuff you want to do for like healthy aging and successful aging that's sort of underneath that, perhaps, but that's literally it in a sentence. So if you have older adults over 50 who are engaging in challenging, create— like, it means that they've got all the brain power, they've got all the superpowers. These are who you want to hire. And the one thing I want to define there, um, is dynamic. Every other term tends to make sense to people. Dynamic deliberate play. What is that? Dynamic's a fancy way of saying— so I just said there's a bunch of use-it-or-lose-it skills, right? On the physical side, the big 5 are the 5 for functional fitness, and dynamic is literally a way of shorthand for the— it's any activity that demands strength, stamina, balance, agility, and flexibility, which are the— and maybe a little power, right? Those are the 5— those are the skills you need to train over time. So, and deliberate play, lifelong learning is really key to preserving cognitive function for a whole bunch of reasons. We can talk about why, but turns out we've all heard of deliberate practice, repetition with incremental advancement, 10,000 hours, Anders Ericsson, Path to Mastery. Turns out deliberate practice is great for certain very particular skills, but in general, we all learn better through deliberate play. Deliberate play is repetition with improvisation, or repetition without repetition.

That's what— that's what kids do the same things last time, but you improv a little. I was gonna say, I, I think— sorry to interrupt you, but I think, I think I heard you say in one interview that one of the reasons kids and children learn so quickly, because they're more engaged with deliberate, you know, deliberate play.

And yeah, but by the way, first of all, thank you for doing your freaking homework, because not everything— oh no, no problem.

Oh, it's, it's—

this is Really, I really like— like, shout out to you, Vinny. Really appreciate it.

That's a lot coming from you.

So one of the reasons I thought I could learn to park ski in my, in my 50s was this idea. So we've all heard about the motor learning window, right? You can't become a ballet dancer or a gymnast after 25. And some of that is true, like there's some— there, there are certain things that like are a little easier to onboard under that, but most of is not that. It's that the way we learn as kids is we play, right? There's— we're not attached. We're involved in the process. We're not attached to outcome. There's no shame. There's no embarrassment because there's no, like, there's no failure, right, when you're playing. And I always say with deliberate practice, you're only right with one if you do the exact same thing and build on it. With deliberate play, Meaning like there's in 365 degrees, there's only one degree of right. With deliberate play, there's only one degree of wrong, which is you do what you did before and try to repeat it, right? Everything else you do is right. There's no wrong answer with deliberate play, right? It's so much more freedom. If you look under the hood at like shame, embarrassment, self-consciousness, what these things do to learning, And more important, so what you get from play is a shit ton of dopamine and a ton of endorphins. I mean, play floods you with endorphins. And these are really good feel-good chemicals, but quick shorthand for how does learning and memory work in the brain, the more neurochemicals that show up at the front end of experience, the better chance it's going to move from short-term holding into long-term storage. Neurochemicals do lots of jobs. One of the things they do is they tag, especially reward chemicals, which is what we're talking about. They tag experiences important, save for later. So, quick example of this in everybody's life. We remember our flow states. If you think back in your life, your memories are going to be the negative shit, right, that you want to avoid happening again. The positive shit sometimes that's it's tied to historical stuff. I remember my wedding. I remember my bar mitzvah. I remember like those kinds of things, right? And then you remember flow states.

Absolutely.

Because, right? Because they're locked in because of all these neurochemicals. So this is why that works. And you get all this, all these more neurochemicals with play. So that's what, it's not that the motor learning window shuts, it's that we start— stop playing in the way we traditionally played. And if you reboot it, it reopens the way.

Any education—

I mean, I could learn how to park ski in my 50s.

I feel like this is a— this is very good insight that should be shed on the educational system. Like, should they— almost like they should look at this and say maybe having kids sit in chairs— I know there's the Montessori stuff, there are always—

well, if you look at it, if you look at embodied cognition, which is the other thing Body cognition is literally like, we used to think our brains were just up here, and now our brain, we know that it's totally distributed through our body and in the environment, which is extended cognition, and et cetera, et cetera. And so, in body cognition, one of the founding tenets of it is we learn better when we move, right? You want to learn a foreign language? Pair every word to a weird-ass gesture. You'll learn it like 5 times as fast. If you want, if you want to take notes by hand versus taking notes on a computer, because the more motion, 100% locks things into memory faster, right? Like, there's all kinds of stuff like this. And it goes on.

What about that? I think you gave the infant example that you, I think you said an infant, the 2 months, if you, if an, if a mom points at something when they say the inf—

Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was, yeah, that's, that information is in the, we turned all this into a training.

Oh, that's where, okay, maybe that's where I saw it.

Right. And in the training, I talk about it. Yeah, this is sort of like one of my favorite geeky embodied cognition facts, which is, is an infant gesture point, like points at a thing and mom says, oh, that's a coffee cup. Within 2 months of that pointing, the kid will learn the word coffee cup. So it's a combination of like action, the kid is acting and pointing in the world and hearing the word. And so what this means, and this is crazy, but so they've done all these studies and they found that in low-income communities, people gesture less than in higher-income communities. They have smaller vocabularies and they have smaller gesture vocabularies. And so there's all these training. And if you, so if infants don't gesture early, it's a huge break on intelligence. So there's now all these programs in low-income communities that literally just teach parents how to gesture more. And as a result, like, you know, totally free workshop, come learn how to gesture more and your kid is going to be a ton smarter as a result, which is really kind of— this is some of the stuff that's like— embodied cognition has been around for 20, 25 years at this point, but it's just in the past like 3 to 5 that we're getting like we understand why it's working, it's getting really practical. That was, you know, we took a bunch of ideas out of that in our learning protocol. And a lot of it was like more about like not doing dumb stuff rather than adding in new things to do, right? A lot of it was like things we're not going to do that most people do. And but it was, you know, that my favorite stuff from, you know, from my origin story, right? Like, when this shit gets practical, I get rid— that's when it gets really super fun, because then you're like, okay, take this stuff in the lab and I can take it into the world and try to test it.

Yeah.

You know, the advantage of the Flow Research Collective is I got a lot of people who want to run those experiments with me.

Yeah. Well, Steve, I could literally have a conversation for 12 hours here, and I know you got a hard stop. I want to respect your time. Where do people find you? When is the book out? Give us, you know, end of this month, I think, right? February?

Book is out. Yeah, book is out in 2 weeks. So February 28th. Though I have heard tell that some people are placing preorders or getting it early. I can't believe the publishing industry is managing to do anything early, but theoretically you can go if you want to learn more about the book. Narcountry.com. And there's— if you haven't been there, so all this stuff about the Peak Performance Aging Experiment where we taught a bunch of older adults how to park, we turned it into a video. We had a National Geographic videographer follow us around. So there's really fun videos up there, a whole bunch of stuff like that. If you're really interested in, in some of the flow stuff, flowresearchcollective.com is that. And For your listeners, if the flow stuff is interesting, I said we do all these trainings. Anybody can sign up. You can go to getmoreflow.com and you can sign up for a free hour-long coaching call basically with somebody on my staff. They'll tell you about our trainings and see if they're right, but it's really like, let me apply flow principles to your life and, and, and that sort of stuff.

Very cool stuff. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for your time.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Now, your time is priceless, and in terms of dollars and It's valuable. Whether you're an entrepreneur, executive, or a manager, you're paid well. But when you're short on time, you end up in a tailspin. Now, if you want to get more out of less time, just go to getmoreflow.com.

We'll show you how.

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

All the best.

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