What is Flow? Peak Performance Explained by Steven Kotler

What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to achieve? Paradigm shifting, Never seen before. Breakthroughs consistently. And I thought as a way of kind of introducing this topic and introducing today, I would start off talking about where I started with this question. I came to this question of impossibility through an unusual door. I walked in through the door of journalism. And in the early 1990s, when I became a journalist, action adventure sports were a really hot topic. So back then, surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding and the like were catching a lot of attention. The X Games were starting out, the Gravity Games. And back then, if you could write and ski or write and surf or write and rock climb, there was work. I couldn't do any of those things very well, but I really needed the work. So I lied to my editors and I was lucky enough to spend the better portion of 10 years chasing extreme athletes around mountains and across oceans. And I will tell you that if you are not an extreme athlete and you spend all your time chasing extreme athletes around mountains, across oceans, you tend to break things. I broke a lot of things. And that meant I got to take a lot of time off. And what would happen is I'd be hanging out and I'd snap this or that, and then I'd have to take four months, five months off. And when I came back, the progress I saw was astounding. It was amazing. It was leaps and bounds kind of progress. Stuff that had been absolutely impossible just four months ago was not just being done, it was being iterated upon. Now, this caught my attention for a number of reasons. The first is that back in the early 1990s, action and adventure sports was a punk rock pastime practiced by rowdy, irreverent people without a lot of natural advantages. So most of the people I spent my time with, they had very, very little education. They had almost no money. And the vast majority of people I knew came from horrifically difficult childhoods. Destroyed homes, not just broken homes, destroyed homes. And yet here they were on a regular basis, reinventing what was possible for our species, extending the limits of kinesthetic possibility. I'm not going to linger too much on action sports today, but I just want to give you one quick example so you know what we're talking about. So surfing is a very old sport. It dates back to 400 A.D. and from 400 A.D. until 1996, progress was really slow, incremental at best. 25ft was the biggest wave anybody had ever surfed. And above that, everybody believed it was impossible. There were physics Papers written about how it's impossible to paddle into a wave over 25ft and possible to surf a wave over 25ft. As you can see from this photo, Today, less than two decades later, surfers are routinely pulling into waves over 100ft tall. This caught my attention what the heck was going on. But I also knew because I had broken 82 bones at that point, that if I didn't take my question out of Action Sports and into other places, I was probably going to kill myself. So that's what I did. And I really took this question pretty much into every domain imaginable. And I wrote a lot of books about these topics. So in Tomorrowland, for example, I focused on those maverick innovators who turned science fiction ideas into science fact technology, who did the impossible of literally dreaming up the future in bold. I looked at upstart entrepreneurs, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, people who had built world changing, impossible businesses in near record time in abundance. The book that Vishen mentioned teamed up with my good friend Peter Diamandis. And we looked at small teams and individuals who are going after grand global challenges, things like poverty or healthcare or energy scarcity or water scarcity. These are things that just a few decades back had been the sole province of large corporations and big governments. And yet here were individuals tackling these impossible challenges. So what I discovered in all these domains is that it doesn't actually matter where you look. You could be talking about the action, adventure, sport, athletes, you could be talking about business tycoons, you can be talking about technologists or artists. It doesn't matter. Every domain you find, ultimate human performance has the exact same signature. It is a state of consciousness known to researchers as flow. Now, you may know flow by other names, right? You may call it runner's high or being in the zone. If you happen to play basketball, you might call it being unconscious. If you're a beatnik jazz musician, you're being in the pocket. If you do stand up comedy, you're in the forever box. Flow is a technical term. As I mentioned earlier, it is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness, one where we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, it refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. We get so focused on the task at hand, everything else just disappears. Action and awareness will start to merge. Your sense of self will vanish, Time will dilate, which is a fancy way of saying it passes strangely. So sometimes, occasionally it'll slow down. And you get that freeze frame effect from anyone who's been in a car crash, and more frequently it speeds up and five hours go by in like five minutes. And throughout, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. Now, flow science is actually quite old. It dates back to the late 1880s, which was the very first time somebody figured out that an altered state of consciousness, which is what flow is, had a radical impact on performance. Signs of flow took a huge step forward in the 60s, 70s, 80s, thanks to this man. This is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He is often called the godfather of flow psychology. He was the chairman of the University of Chicago psychology department. And he conducted one of the largest global studies on optimal performance anybody's ever done. And he learned three things about flow that are really fundamental. The first thing he discovered is that flow is definable. It has seven core characteristics, and I listed some of them for you a second ago. Uninterrupted concentration and the present moment, vanishing of self, time dilation, and so forth. And because it is definable, it is measurable. So we have extremely well validated psychometric instruments to measure flow at this point. Csikszentmihalyi also discovered that flow is universal, shows up in everyone, everywhere, provided certain initial conditions are met. He also discovered why flow is flowy and why it's called flow. So in his giant study, ran around the world talking to people, saying, hey, tell me about the time in your life when you feel your best, you perform your best. And the vast majority, tens of thousands of people said, you know, when I'm at my best, I'm in this state. And every action, every decision, flows seamlessly, perfectly, effortlessly from the last. So flow is actually a phenomenological description. It's how the state makes us feel. Interestingly, for the state to make us feel flowy. Underneath that, you actually get a really good shorthand definition of what flow is. For every action, every decision to lead seamlessly, perfectly, effortlessly to the last flow has to be as close to near perfect, high speed, creative decision making as we can get. So that's a quick shorthand way of thinking about what flow actually is. Final thing that Csikszentmihalyi discovered is that flow is fundamental. Flow is fundamental to well being and overall life satisfaction. In fact, in his study, he found that the people who score off the charts highest in the world for overall life satisfaction and well being are the people with the most flow in their lives. So after Csiks Atmihalyi was done with this kind of foundational work, the next question researchers turned their attention to was, all right, so this is optimal performance. Great. How optimal? What are we talking about? Turns out pretty optimal. What we now know in athletics, for example, is pretty much every gold medal or world championship that's ever been won, there's a flow state at its heart. We know that flow in the arts, in technology, in science, accounts for significant progress, major paradigm shifts, usually a flow state at the heart in business, we have some of the most compelling data. So McKinsey, the global consultancy, did a 10 year study and they found that top executives in flow are five times more productive than out of flow. Five times more productive is 500% more productive. Means you could go to work on Monday, take Tuesday through Friday off and get as much done as your steady state peers. Interestingly, two days a week in flow, you are 1000% more productive than the competition. So think about this for a second. We work with a lot of top organizations, lot of top businesses that are now starting to incorporate flow into their fundamental DNA. Anybody who is not doing this at this point, if employees in flow are 1000% more productive versus company over here that doesn't have employees in flow, you can see the problem. After this work on how optimal got done, the next question researchers turned attention to is where is this coming from? And here we've got a huge boost from technology. So biotechnology is currently accelerating at five times the speed of Moore's law. It is doubling in power every four months. And as a result, we are able for the very first time to peer under the hood of flow. We can see where it's coming from. This is one example of one of these experiments. This is me taking part in an experiment designed by Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman. And I've been hoisted 150ft in the air and I'm being dropped into a circus net. And I've got a perceptual chronometer on my wrist and we're trying to figure out why time slows down in a flow state. And I will tell you, we were semi successful in that experiment. It also took about six, seven months of hard chiropractic work until my neck worked right again. So people, people were injured to bring you this information. What all this neuroscience has taught us is that a lot of our old ideas about ultimate human performance are very, very wrong. In fact, the most famous of these old ideas is what's known as the 10% brain myth. This is something you've probably all heard of. It's the idea that at any one Point, we're just using a small portion of our brain, say 10%. So ultimate performance, aka flow, must be the full brain on overdrive, right? Turns out we actually had it exactly backwards in flow. We're not using more of the brain, we're actually using less of the brain. The technical term for this is transient, meaning temporary hypo frontality. Hypo is hypo. It's the opposite of hyper. It means to slow down, to shut down, to deactivate. And frontality is the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that's right back here. This is an extremely powerful part of your brain. It handles complex logical decision making. It handles long term planning. Your sense of morality comes from here, your sense of willpower. In flow, this portion of the brain shuts down. It's actually an efficiency exchange. The brain is trading energy it needs for attention, and it's shutting down down non critical structures. When it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, all kinds of crazy things happen. Why does time pass so strangely in a flow state? For example, time, it turns out, is calculated all over the prefrontal cortex. And as parts of it wink out, it can no longer separate past from present from future. We're plunged into a state researchers talk about as the deep now. Now, the deep now has a huge impact on performance. If you think about most of your fears, most of your anxieties, very few of them are in the right here right now. They're usually horrible things that happened in the past that we'd like to avoid happening again in the present. Or they're scary things that might maybe could happen in the future, and we'd like to steer around it. When we end up in the deep now, when time gets shut down in a flow state, anxiety disappears, your stress hormones flood out of your system. The nervous system actually resets at this point. Same thing happens to your sense of self. So self is actually a network. It's a bunch of different structures in the prefrontal cortex that are linked together. And like any network, as parts of it start to wink out, the network collapses. As a result, our sense of self disappears again. Huge impact on performance. When your sense of self disappears, your inner critic, that nagging, always on defeatist voice in your head, your iter, Woody Allen in flow, Woody gets silent. Right? So we experience this as liberation, as freedom. We are actually getting out of our own way, literally. As a result, risk taking goes up. Creativity, because you're no longer doubting, every one of your neat ideas goes up. Now on top of these changes in kind of neural anatomical function in flow, we also get a huge boost in neurochemistry. So neurochemicals are literally nothing fancier than signaling molecules. It's one of the ways the brain talks to itself and talks to the body. And in flow, we get five of the most potent neurochemicals that the brain can produce. And if you really want to understand why flow allows us to do the impossible, Understanding these neurochemicals is key. Now, all five of them amplify performance. They boost physical performance. They will do everything from increase strength to deadened pain, to amplifying muscle reaction time. More importantly, they impact cognitive function. And if you really want to understand how flow can help us do the impossible, you, need to understand how the state impacts the three sides of the high performance triangle, and more specifically, how these five neurochemicals impact the three sides of the high performance triangle. And that's motivation, creativity, and learning. And I'll start with motivation. So besides being performance enhancing chemicals, the five chemicals that show up in flow are pleasure drugs. In fact, they're the five most potent pleasure drugs the brain can produce. Flow is the only time it appears that we get all five at once, which is why flow is the most addictive state on earth. Now, researchers don't like the term addictive. It's got negative connotations, apparently. Instead, they use things like autotelic, which means an end in itself. Or they say things like flow is the source code of intrinsic motivation. But when you look at that McKinsey study, and you find people 500% more productive in flow, this massive boost in motivation is one of the main reasons why something similar happens to creativity. So creativity is really critical, right? It's been called the most important 21st century skill, the number one thing we need to thrive in this current century. And it's also a massively misunderstood concept. So under the hood, at a mechanistic level, creativity is fairly straightforward. It happens when the brain takes in novel information, Uses that information to connect to older ideas, and uses those connections and those new ideas that it creates to create something startling new in the world. That's the mechanism underneath it, flow. And the neurochemicals that show up in flow surround this process. So when we move into flow, we take in more information per second. So data acquisition goes up, we pay more attention to that information. So salience goes up. We find faster connections between that incoming information and older ideas. So pattern recognition goes up, and we find faster and farther flung connections between that incoming idea and older Idea. So lateral thinking or outside the box thinking goes up and on the back end, when we have to turn those new ideas in something in the world, when we actually have to innovate from them, risk taking goes up. So creativity is surrounded by flow. And as a result, in studies run by my organization and others, we see that flow can amplify creativity 400 to 700%. It's a huge spike. Even cooler, Teresa Almable at Harvard discovered that that heightened creativity, it can outlast the flow state by a day, sometimes two. And what this suggests, and there's more research that needs to be done and we're actually running a big study right now to try to poke at this a little bit more. But it suggests that flow doesn't just train the brain to be more creative in the moment, it actually trains the brain to think more creatively over time, over the long haul. The final piece in the puzzle is learning, right? We live in a very fast paced world. If you want to succeed, you're going to have to speed up your rate of learning. Flow does this for you. So quick shorthand for how learning works in the the more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, better chance it's going to move from short term holding into long term storage. Flow is this giant neurochemical dump. As a result, in studies run by the US military on radar operators and snipers, they find that learning rates in flow will increase 470%. Put this in different context. We've all heard about Malcolm Gladwell's fabled 10,000 hours to mastery. What the research consistently shows is that flow can cut those in half. Now the really good news, and this is a lot of the work the flow genome project has helped pioneer, is that what we now know is that flow states are hackable. What we have discovered is that flow states have triggers. These are preconditions that lead to more flow. There are 20 of them in total. I'm going to talk about all of them in a second. But the first thing you need to know is the most obvious. Flow follows focus. It can only show up when all of our attention is focused in the right here, the right now. So that's what most of these triggers do. They drive attention into the now. As you can see, there are 20 of them and they come in two flavors. So there are individual triggers. What does it take me to get into a flow state? And then there are group triggers. This is what creates a group flow state, a shared collective version of flow. And we've all had experiences with group flow. Sung in a church choir, played in a band, gone to Burning Man. Taken part in a phenomenal brainstorming session where ideas are just flying off the wall. Seen a fourth quarter comeback in football. If you saw what the Patriots did to the Falcons in the last quarter of the super bowl last year. Perfect example of what group flow looks like in action. So all 20 of these triggers, individual and group, all drive attention into the now. For example, the first of the individual triggers, passion. We hear a lot about passion these days. It's one of these great buzzwords, very mystical. The only reason passion matters, why passion matters, is we pay more attention to those things we believe in. It drives flow, and flow drives performance risk. Why did action adventure sport athletes experience just spike in the 1990s? Because risk levels in action adventure sports started going through the roof. And risk drives focus. Drives flow. So interestingly, if you're interested in applying these triggers in your life, there's a lot of different ways to do it. And I'm gonna talk about flow and organizations a little bit. Cause I think it's a more interesting topic later today. We can talk about individual flow a little bit more. So flow in organizations. You can do this in small, medium or large versions, and small. Consider Amazon. So in group flow, one of the most potent of group flow's triggers comes from improv comedy. And it's the idea that you always say yes. So if somebody comes up to me and says, stephen, there's a blue elephant in the bathroom. And I say, shut up. No, there's not. It's not funny. Nobody's laughing. If I say, crap, I hope he's not using up all the toilet paper. You're giggling, right? It's a little funny. I'm moving in the right direction. Works the same way. So in brainstorming sessions, this means ideas have to be additive. They have to lead somewhere. It doesn't mean, by the way, you can't critique other people's ideas, you absolutely can. But it still has to be positive and moving forward when you do now at Amazon, group flow is so important to Jeff Bezos, and it is so easy for managers and big organizations to say no to ideas that Jeff has institutionalized a yes. He has a policy called the institutional yes, which is at Amazon, if you want to say no to an idea, somebody brings you an idea and you want to say no to it, you can't just say no. You also have to write a two page paper and post it on the internal company website telling people why you're saying no, not easy. They make it very hard. Drives a lot of flow at that company. So to talk about flow and organizations in a medium level, what does it look like when you import a number of these triggers at once? Really good place to look. Montessori education. So 10 years, 15 years ago, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and a University of Utah researcher named Kevin Rathunde went looking for the highest flow arenas they could find that weren't in action sports. And one of the things they discovered was Montessori education. Montessori education is an extremely high flow education. And that's one of the reasons the accelerated learning and the amplified creativity that Montessori kids tend to outperform other children of the same age on every single test you can give them. From intellectual tests to social skills. Doesn't matter. Montessori education is built around 33 important flow triggers. The first is autonomy. Right? We like being masters of our own ship. We pay more attention to stuff when we're driving the bus. Montessori education is self directed learning, right? The kids get to choose what they're working on. Google's 20% time, right? Where they give employees 20% their time to work on whatever they want. Why? It's a group flow trigger or it's a flow trigger. Excuse me. The next thing Montessori education has is uninterrupted concentration. It is built around 90 to 120 minute blocks of uninterrupted concentration. Self directed learning. Uninterrupted concentration. Uninterrupted concentration is probably the foundational flow hack. Lastly, deep embodiment, which is just a fancy way of saying I'm paying attention to multiple sensory streams at once. So what does this look like in education? It emphasizes learning through doing. Right? Don't just read about the windmill, go out and build one. This will engage your hands and your eyes and your senses. Pay more attention to it. This also, by the way, leads me to the first flow hack that I'm going to give you guys. And it's the most important. And when I go into organizations and I work with organizations, the first thing I tell people is if they can't hang a sign on their door that says fire truck off, I'm flowing. Can't do this work. So if you work for a company or you run a company that has policies like emails must be returned in an hour or messages must be returned in 15 minutes, that's a disaster. You are absolutely destroying the foundational thing you need to create high performance in the workplace. So in extreme high performing environments, like working with the Navy Seals or the action adventure sport athletes, what you see people doing is literally building their lives around these flow triggers. So with the Action4Athletes, you've got risk, you've also got lots of novelty, complexity and unpredictability. Novelty. They're performing in living environments always changing. Right. Complexity again, living environments, always changing. No two waves are the same. The snowpack in Alaska and big mountains can morph on a moment by moment basis. Unpredictability. All three of these things grab attention, drive it into the now. Passion, risk, clear goals. All these things are surrounding the action adventure sport athletes and more and more in the 90s. And as a result, huge spike in flow. But it's not just action adventure sport athletes. Any place you see a culture of innovation, Silicon Valley, for example, think about it. Lots of passion, lots of novelty, complexity, unpredictability, lots of risk, massive amounts of flow. So we're really important thing to know about these flow triggers is not only do they exist, they're actually really easy to work with. So a couple years ago, my organization teamed up with Google and we ran a six week joint learning exercise and we took a team of about 80 different Googlers. And this is from all over the company. So we had people from facilities, marketing, PR coders, engineers, and we trained them up in four high performance basics. And when I say basics, I mean absolute basics. Things like sleep, hygiene, get enough sleep at night, seven and a half hours is usually what you need, that sort of thing. And we trained them up in four flow triggers. And after six weeks of training them up, and this was basically about an hour's worth of homework a day spread out through the day. So it wasn't one solid chunk. We saw a 35 to 80% increase in flow. That is a staggering increase in flow. To put it in context, McKinsey in their original research discovered that most of us spend about 5% of our work life in flow, often without knowing about it. And if you could increase that by about 15 percentage points, overall workplace productivity would almost double. Now this might make our program sound fancy. It's not our programs, it turns out flow is eminently trainable. We are all hardwired for optimal performance. We have a digital class, in fact, called Flow Fundamentals that's digital delivered and we test pre and post on it. And it was built very, very quickly, right after the Rise of Superman was written because there was a lot of demand. And we thought, okay, let's make a digital training. Who knew and built fast, put out there, always kept meaning to redo it. And the reason we haven't is testing pre and post, vast majority of people get a 70% boost in the seven fundamental categories in flow. The point is that flow is eminently trainable. This is very learnable stuff. Now, interestingly, all of this stuff is starting to move a lot faster. And it is starting to move a lot faster because the four fields that surround kind of states of consciousness and studies of consciousness and high performance psychology, neurobiology, pharmacology, and technology are all starting to accelerate exponentially as well. So psychology, and by this I mean both the field of psychology, which is advancing so quickly because for the very first time, we're using machine learning and big data. So we're sending out surveys, and Instead of getting 5,000 for 500 responses or 50 responses, we can get 50,000 responses. So we can gather a lot of information. The other thing that has changed in psychology is our version of who we are in the world, Our version of our internal psychology over the past 50, 70 years has undergone a revolution. Think about who we get to be in the world. Go back to the 1950s, and even though it's a stereotype, it's a fairly accurate one. You had Betty Homemaker on one side, you had the strong, silent marble man on the other, and those were the boxes most people had to live in. Now we've got 90 different terms for sexuality that people are using. Now we've got Victoria's Secret transgender Runway models getting standing ovations. Our version of who we get to be in the world has massively expanded over the past 70 years. I always point out that most people don't actually understand how far we've come so fast. So until 1997, when a university of Washington neuroscientist named Jaak Ponsept traced the six primary emotional pathways in mammals, emotions were not really a serious topic for science. I know that sounds crazy, but you could not really talk. You could talk about fear maybe, but you could not talk about things like wisdom or, or empathy. These were laughable concepts until 1997, until we figured out where they were coming from. We've come a huge distance very, very quickly thanks to advances in psychology. Neurobiology obviously gives us the tools to map and measure what's happening in our brains and our bodies when we're experiencing what is often downright inexplicable. Pharmacology is giving us a whole new suite of tools that are allowing us to experience some of these states nearly on demand, right? These states of consciousness for thousands of years were very rare, fleeting occurrences that happened maybe sometimes if you got lucky. Now we can get them through pills very, very quickly. And what's coming in, what's in pill form today will be in technological form tomorrow. And the technological form stuff we'll talk about in a second. But what's really important about what's happening in technology is it's taking these states to scale. So consider communitas. Communitas is the giant collective version of group flow. It's what happens when an entire stadium crowd in a rock concert all merges with the music, right? Think about the technology behind music, right? Think about acoustics and what's happened in the past 50 years. We're taking experiences that used to be for 50 people around a drum circle, around a campfire, and 100 to 200,000 people are getting to have them at once. This is a radical, radical, radical shift. And the technology is getting really interesting. So this is transcranial magnetic stimulation. Essentially, it's a radar operator for the US Air Force. And she shot a weak magnetic pulse through a prefrontal cortex. Artificially induced flow is what it's called, lasts for about 20 to 40 minutes. Now, to give you an idea how powerful this was, they did this crazy study at the University of Sydney where they took 46 people and they gave them a nine dot problem to solve, right? Connect four, excuse me, connect nine dots with four lines without taking your pencil off the paper in 10 minutes or less. Very complex, creative problem solving challenge. Requires a lot of pattern recognition, a lot of thinking. Under normal conditions, less than 5% of people can solve it. In the original study group, nobody solved it. Then they took a different group of 46 people. They gave them transcranial magnetic stimulation, they knocked out the prefrontal cortex, they amplified pattern recognition and created problem solving. 43% of the people solved the problem in record time. So the Air Force has discovered that radar operators who have to detect fancy patterns over long periods of time perform better this way. So they're using it before people go on duty. There are stockbrokers who are using the same thing before they're going onto the trading floor because they can spot more patterns. In Silicon Valley, they're setting up shops where people are doing this, not for what it's doing, for cognitive enhancement, but because it also, by quieting the prefrontal cortex, by turning off the inner critic, by putting us in the deep now, it resets the nervous system, as I mentioned, so it's being Used to treat depression and anxiety as well. Another thing that's happening is we're getting a lot faster at this stuff, right? So Back in the 1990s, University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richie Davidson discovered that Tibetan Buddhists who had 30,000 hours of cushion time could put their brains in a really radical state of consciousness, the brain waves of which are very similar to flow. 30,000 hours is a long time, right? I don't have 30 hours. I rarely have three hours. 30,000 hours is three decades worth of work. So it's not really practical advice for most of us in the real world. What we've discovered is that we can use these same EEG headsets to record the brainwave patterns of people who have spent 30 years learning to meditate. And then we can use neurofeedback to train normal people to move in that direction. And we can compress what used to take 30 years into about six weeks of training. And this is where we are at today. One of the other cool things, side note, just interestingly, six weeks is a healthy amount of time. What we've discovered, by the way, is that even four days of meditation, just four days of focused meditation, is enough to start to enhance cognitive function. We've shrunk it down from 30 years into four days. I also take a picture of this screen. These are things you're going to want. So the top one, flow hacks, if you're interested in flow fundamentals, this is where you go to check it out. The bottom one is the website of the flow genome project. So if you go there, there is a free flow profile on the landing page. Anybody can take it. And it is a traitology. It basically says if you're this kind of person, you'll find more flow in these directions. And interestingly, just little research. This has become one of the. I think it's now the largest study ever run on optimal psych. About 80,000 people have taken it. And when we first launched it, we were really sure that the vast majority of our respondents who had the most flow in their lives and where it would show up, thought we were going to look at performing artists and action adventure sport athletes. We were absolutely certain that was the way it was going to come out. Everything else would have been ridiculous. Turns out, no, turns out the vast majority of people find flow doing knowledge work, using their brain, being creative architecture, coding, writing. Probably what most people in this room do all day long, every day. So I want to tell you why I think all this information matters so much. And to do that, I have to explain this number. 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. So that is the amount of time it took Roger Bannister to run the world's first four minute mile. And when he did this, it was an absolute impossible. In fact, there were op EDS in the New York times written by doctors who said, you know, besides having a ticker tape parade waiting for Bannister at the finish line, we're going to need a hearse. So people thought it was going to kill him. It also took forever to run this first four minute mile. If you look at mile times, they dropped about a quarter second. A quarter second, a decade for 60, 70 years leading up to it. But Roger Bannister runs the first four minute mile and then a month later, somebody breaks his record. A couple months later, somebody else breaks his record. In fact, within 10 years, teenagers had broken that record. So you got to ask yourself, how is that possible? The physical challenge, which took us forever 70 years to get to, it didn't change. Running a 4 minute mile still requires running a sub 4 mile. All that changed is the frame, the mental frame we built around the task. What used to be impossible was suddenly viewed as possible. And that somehow made it a whole lot more possible. This is known to researchers as the banister effect. And what it really is is an extremely tight coupling between the mind and the body, right? You have to believe you are capable of achieving the impossible before you can actually achieve the impossible. There's just no other way around it. And this is the reason I've been telling you about flow for the past 40 minutes. And I think this knowledge puts a wonderful and yet kind of terrible burden on each and every one of us, right? Ask yourself, what kinds of impossible grand challenges would you guys go after? Would you solve in your own life? Would you try to solve in the world if you could be 500% more productive, if you could be 600% more creative, if you could cut learning times in half. This is exactly what is available to each and every one of you today. But what you choose to do, this information is entirely up to you. But thanks for listening.