How to Do the Impossible This Year
Episode Stats
Summary
Steven Kotler is a peak performance expert, the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective, and the author of numerous books, including his latest, The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer. In this episode, Steven talks about how he defines an impossible goal, and then unpacks the formula for making the impossible possible.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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There are goals in life that seem very attainable, and then there are goals which seem practically
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impossible. Rising out of poverty or overcoming a traumatic childhood, becoming a bestselling
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author, deadlifting 500 pounds. With impossible goals, the odds seem long and it isn't clear
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how to get from point A to point B. My guest today has spent decades figuring out the roadmap
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for making that journey. His name is Steven Kotler. He's a peak performance expert, the
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executive director of the Flow Research Collective, and the author of numerous books, including
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his latest, The Art of Impossible, a peak performance primer. Today on the show, Steven talks about
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how he defines an impossible goal and then unpacks the formula for making the impossible possible.
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That formula begins with harnessing the five big intrinsic motivators that will give you
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focus for free and what you need to activate in a certain sequence, and then moves through
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the six levels of grit that should be trained in a particular order as well. We discuss the
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importance of creativity and continual learning, and how to assess the ROI of your reading.
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Steven also explains how flow amplifies the process of achieving peak performance, and
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why you need to rediscover the primary flow activity from your childhood. At the end of
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our conversation, Steven shares some things you begin doing today to start tackling your
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impossible goals. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash
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art of impossible. Steven joins you now via clearcast.io.
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All right, Steven Kotler, welcome back to the show.
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So we had you on the show back in 2014. It's been almost seven years when we talked to you
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about your book, The Rise of Superman, which is all about decoding the science of flow, which
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is this optimal state of attention that time slows down and you're able to perform at peak
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performance. You got a new book out called The Art of the Impossible. How is this book,
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big picture, how is this book, your new one, Art of Impossible, a continuation of your thinking
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and research that you did in The Rise of Superman?
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Steven Kotler It's a great question. So Art Impossible is a
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peak performance primer. And one, the first thing that distinguishes it, unlike The Rise of
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Superman, which was built around stories, predominantly athletes accomplishing impossible feats using
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flow and other kind of cognitive peak performance skills to really overcome incredible odds and
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accomplish possible feats. Flow is one portion, it's actually like one quarter of the full kind of
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cognitive peak performance picture. And one of the things we learned in training flow, first of all,
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Art of Impossible is not a, or a, The Rise of Superman is by no means a how-to. It's a storytelling
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book, right? It's about flow. It's got a ton of information, but it is not, you don't come away
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going, oh, I immediately know step A, step B, step C, here's how I apply this stuff in my life.
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And big picture, the truth of the matter is if your interest is in peak performance,
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flow is necessary, but not sufficient. And there's other things that are also required. In fact,
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most of the sub-skills that are optimized in flow, motivation, grit, goal-setting skills,
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learning skills, creativity, and problem-solving skills, if you don't have a very solid foundation
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in these skills as well, it's very difficult. Flow is an enormous uptick in performance,
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you know, hundreds of percentiles above normal. But if you don't have the skills,
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the actual skills that flow is going to optimize, if they're not laid in, you're going to have a
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problem sustaining the state, really using it for extended long-term peak performance.
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And of course, because there are a lot of times when flow just doesn't show up,
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you're not going to have the requisite skills to keep going without flow. So flow is necessary,
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but not sufficient. I wanted to do a full picture. This is the full suite. This is everything that is
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involved in cognitive peak performance. And it turns out, when you look at the full suite,
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when you look at the big picture, what you find out is, not surprisingly, it's a sequence. It's a
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system. It's all of our biology, essentially. And peak performance is nothing more than getting
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our biology to work for us rather than against us. And it turns out, when you look at all of those
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things, and especially from a neurobiological point of view, which is the work I do, you start to
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realize, oh, wow, these things work together in an order, in a sequence. If you're interested in
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really maximizing performance, these things are much more effective. You go farther,
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faster, and with less work if you're doing all this stuff at once rather than just trying to
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utilize flow, for example. So there's a formula to doing the impossible.
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And then the answer is yes, but that sounds freaking absurd if I don't define the impossible
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first. So my career has been spent studying people in all walks of life, in all domains,
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in all fields, in all areas who have accomplished what you could call capital I impossible, right?
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This is doing that which has never been done before. And these could be physical impossibles,
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four-minute miles. These could be intellectual impossibles, Einstein's theory of relativities.
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These could be cultural impossibles, Rosa Parks sitting at the front of the bus.
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Doesn't really matter because across the board, you see the same things. But the book is meant to be
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applied by anybody who is interested in accomplishing what I have called small-I impossible.
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Small-I impossible is all that stuff that we truly believe is impossible for ourselves.
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There are lots of examples here. Rising out of poverty is a small-I impossible. Overcoming deep
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trauma, small-I impossible. Becoming world-class in whatever you do, that's small-I impossible.
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When I was growing up in Cleveland, Ohio in the blue-collar 70s, and I wanted to be a writer from
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the time I was four or five years old, I didn't know any writers. I didn't know anybody who was a
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writer. I didn't know how you became a writer. It was like I woke up one morning and looked at my
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parents and said, you know, today I think I want to be an elf. No, a dwarf. No, a hobbit. I'm going to be a
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hobbit when I grow up, right? It was roughly the same kind of career trajectory in terms of like,
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how do you get from A to B? So that's what I mean by small-I impossible. It's those things we
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believe are impossible for us where there is no clear path between point A where we are and point
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B where we want to go, and statistically, little chances of success. That said, the book is applicable
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to anybody who's interested in increasing peak performance, but the actual system and sequence
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is designed for anybody interested in going after high, hard goals, exceeding their limitations,
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exceeding their expectations, and really turning their biggest dreams into their most recent
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achievements. That's what the focus is. All right. So it's the formula to achieve both
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big-I impossible, small-I impossible. But why do you think so many people fail to live up? Like,
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why don't a lot of people figure out this formula on their own, like of achieving that small-I
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impossible? Like, why do so many people fail to live up to their potential?
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So here's the real answer as far as I can tell. When you talk to actual peak performers, and I
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know, you know, I'm familiar with your show and your audience that, you know, you've got some hard
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chargers who listen to you on a regular basis. What happens when those folks read The Art of
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Impossible, and enough have at this point that I think I can speak learnedly about this, or a little
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bit learnedly, is most people go, oh, wow, I was doing about 60, 65% of this stuff on my own. I
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didn't even know it. Or I did, I was doing it intentionally, but I didn't know it was a
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sequence. I didn't know how it was designed to work. And there are usually gaps in their game.
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And it varies. You know what I mean? For example, I did a lot of work. I've done a lot of work with
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the military and the US Special Forces and things like that. And their gaps tend to be around things
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like creative problem solving and recovery, things that are not often kind of part of the kind of
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military structure. They're starting to be, but they're not, they're not there. Other people,
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a lot of most normal people tend to come off because they haven't optimized all of the different
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quantities of intrinsic motivation. They don't have all their intrinsic motivators pointing in
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the same direction. They don't have, there are six levels of grit, it appears, and they all seem to
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be needed to be trained independently. And you may have a couple of them, but you may have gaps in the
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chain. So a lot of it is that kind of stuff. Because as I said, peak performance is nothing
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more than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. It's a limited suite of things,
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but we all have weaknesses, right? All of us have weaknesses someplace. And that's usually
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why we get derailed. It's not the whole picture. It's usually three or four elements in the big picture
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that are missing. And that once we dial them in and start to understand how these things work,
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together and how to get them to work together, that usually tends to be the problem.
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Well, one thing you say in the book, you make a point about this idea that this is all about
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harnessing your innate biology that I already have. So I want to go back to this idea. I mean,
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what this is all about, what the rather than possible is about is helping people harness their
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innate biological processes that allow them to perform at their peak. Something you say,
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you said that biology scales, personality doesn't. What do you mean by that?
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You've seen this a lot in peak performance. So unfortunately, fairly frequently in the world
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of it's less done in the world of like the world I'm in, which is like really hardcore science back
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peak performance stuff, but you see it a lot more in coaching and you see it all over self-help
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people figure out works for them. And they try to teach other people, Hey, this worked for me.
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Let me train you in it. Let me build a system. Let me build a company. And invariably
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the vast majority of what works for you is not going to work for other people. And the reason is
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when you're talking about peak performance, certain elements that are very foundational to
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how you should approach peak performance. Like where are you on the introversion to extroversion scale
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or how, what are your risk tolerances? These are things that are biologically hardwired at least to
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50%, if not more, depending on whose numbers you're going by and shaped by very early childhood
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experience. They're more in the category of biological traits. And we used to believe traits
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were totally immutable. You're stuck. You're born with whatever, like where you are on the big five
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personality index is you're going to stay there the rest of your life. We now know that's not true,
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but as a general rule, if you want to change a trait, if you're very introverted and you want to become
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very extroverted, it can take five to 10 years worth of work to do that. Now, somebody might be
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interested in doing that work, but if you give them a peak performance system, right? And they
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haven't done that work and they're very introverted and it was designed by an extrovert, they're going
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to crash and burn. Same thing with risk tolerances, same thing with about seven or eight foundational
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keys in peak performance. Biology, on the other hand, scales. When you go back, one way to think about
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this that's maybe a little easier is when you talk about psychology and most of the terms that you get
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out of coaching or self-help, if they're scientific at all, they come out of psychology. Psychology is
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essentially a metaphor. So the simple example here is mindset. When most people in the world use the term
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mindset, they mean attitude towards life. When psychologists use mindset, they actually mean
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attitudes towards learning. And when neurobiologists use the term mindset, they are actually talking
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about something that happens in the thalamus in the brain with thalamic gating, basically how
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information that is entering the brain gets filtered and sort of top down gating, which is also how
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information in the brain gets filtered. It's a very specific thing taking place within very specific
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networks. And it means a very precise thing. The very precise thing that it means is what you need
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to get the reaction you're looking for. You're not going to always get it when you're hearing it
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psychologically. But when you take it down to mechanism, the basic biology, A plus B equals C
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kind of thing, you get reliable, repeatable results for anyone. It doesn't matter who you are, which is why
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we train at the Flow Research Collective about a thousand people a month. And we've been doing this for a
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while at this point. That's a very large sample size. And we can tell you, we train everybody from the
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U.S. Special Forces to Olympic and professional athletes through like soccer moms from Iowa and
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insurance brokers from Kansas. When you go down to biology, it works for everyone. When you try to
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stay at the level of the psychology, it's often going to exclude people. And when you come in from the
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level of personality, you will often have a disaster. You'll just make turns. It either won't work for
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very long or you'll create a big mess. All right, let's talk about this formula that goes down to
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the biological level of peak performance. And the first part of this is motivation. And that's another
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one of those words that gets thrown around a lot in the self-help community and psychology where
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you got to be motivated. And you're like, what is motivation? Like what exactly? Yeah. What is
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motivation? And why does it matter? Right? Like, okay, well, I want motivation and okay, but what is
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it and why does it matter? Right? That's the question you're asking. Right. So first of all,
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depending on who you talk to, but as general motivation is a psychological catch-all term for
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three or four, depending on how you want to break them down categories of skills. One, there's
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external and internal or extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation are things we
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want that are outside of ourselves, money, sex, fame. Those are all extrinsic motivators.
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Then there are intrinsic motivators. These are things that sort of motivate us automatically. And I'll
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speak more to that in a second. Curiosity, mastery, autonomy, passion, and purpose are the biggest
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five. There are others, but those are the big five. Simultaneously, when people talk about a
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motivation, they're also talking about grit. And as I mentioned before, there are actually six levels
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of grit skills and peak performers need to train sort of all of them. Now we're going to start with
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intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. That's where the conversation starts. And why does motivation
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matter? It's a great question. Let's start there. You have to actually back up one step and understand
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that when it comes to peak performance, like real performance in the world, you have, as a human
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being, very few big levers to reach for. In any given situation, the two things that you really have
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is your focus. Where do you put your attention and what do you choose to ignore? And the action you're
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going to take to accomplish whatever it is you're doing. If you put action and attention on the same
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thing over and over and over again, you get a habit, right? And all a habit is, is it's the action
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performed without the attention, right? You no longer have to focus on it because you've learned how to do
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the thing and you can perform it unconsciously, which is great because when you can perform it
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unconsciously, the brain is much more efficient. It has greater processing speed. A lot of things that
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we need go up. So that's the big picture. When you talk about motivation, what you're really talking
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about is those things like, remember action and focus are about the two biggest things we can work
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with. It's not a hell of a lot you can do on the action side other than keep doing the action over
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and over and over for years until you get better at it. Focus is your big lever. Motivation gives you
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focus for free. It's a huge deal. Your brain is 2% of your body mass. It consumes at rest about 25%
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of your energy. That's huge. When you're actually doing something, it goes up from there. So if you can
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get focus for free, that's a big deal. Energetically, calorically, everything else. Think about
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curiosity. Everything starts with curiosity. It's the foundational human motivator and it gives us a
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little bit of focus for free. When we're curious about something, when you're interested in what
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somebody is saying to you, it's not hard to pay attention to them. It happens automatically. When you're
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into a subject, reading a book is not hard. You're psyched to read the book. You can't wait to get back to
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the book, et cetera. But if you're trying to page through something that's really a textbook and
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you're not into it, twice as much work. And think about curiosity. Neurobiologically,
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curiosity is literally a little bit of the neurochemical norepinephrine and a little bit
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of the neurochemical dopamine. That's all it is. Both of these are focusing. They do a lot of different
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things in the brain. They're pleasure chemicals. So they reward our curiosity, right? Curiosity feeds
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itself. What they mean is the chemicals that are produced by curiosity feel really, really good.
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And curiosity breeds curiosity because of these neurochemicals. These neurochemicals drive focus,
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right? That's what we're experiencing and excitement. That's the emotional side of it.
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But they also prime the brain for learning. So when we're curious about something, it is much
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easier to retain that information for later. And it goes up from there. The secret with curiosity
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is passion is what follows curiosity. Passion is nothing more than the intersection of multiple
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curiosities plus playing at that intersection and producing a series of wins. That's really the
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foundational ingredients in passion. Neurobiologically, it's the same cocktail. Instead of a little bit of
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norepinephrine and dopamine, you get a lot of norepinephrine and dopamine, in which case,
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think about, I'll give you a simple example of passion. Think about romantic love. That is a
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passion. Romantic love. This is, by the way, not my work. This particular bit is Helen Fisher's work
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at Rutgers on the cocktails underneath love. But romantic love is essentially a lot of norepinephrine
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and a lot of dopamine. When you were falling in love with somebody, we've all done that. We've all had
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the experience. Think about how much attention you pay to that person, right? You can't even stop
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thinking about them. That's the big deal with passion. And it sort of goes from there. Passion,
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once we can take that passion and couple it to a purpose greater than ourselves, a cause outside of
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ourselves, that's purpose. Once we have our purpose, what do you need next? It's obvious. You need the
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freedom, the autonomy to pursue that purpose. And once you have the freedom and autonomy to pursue that
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purpose, you need the skills to pursue it well, aka mastery. Those are our big five intrinsic
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motivators. That is the order that they are designed to be created and utilized and that
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they work best. And when they're all pointed in the same direction, a lot of good things happen,
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including you get a ton of flow for a bunch of different reasons. But so not only do you get all
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the benefits, focus for free, amplified learning, et cetera, et cetera, when everything's pointed in the
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same direction, you also drop into flow far more easily and flow amplifies motivation, productivity,
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creativity, learning, empathy, perception, a couple of other things. So it's a big boost and it's a huge
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boost as well. So that's what I mean by there's an order and a sequence. And that's just on the
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intrinsic motivation side. Though I will say the research does say that you want to start with
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extrinsic motivation. You want to start with the external motivation up until the point that sort of you
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your basic safety and security needs are met. If you're still struggling to make rent and pay your
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bills and feed yourself, it's difficult to start cultivating curiosity. You can do it, but it's hard
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because the system is sort of redlined. So what the research shows, and this is Dr. Daniel Kahneman's
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research, we need basically to make enough money to cover our basic needs with a little left over
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for discretionary spending. And once we get to that point, extrinsic, external motivators to
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ourselves, while we still want those things, and they will still motivate us, they are not the best
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way to drive increased performance and productivity and creativity and those things. In other words,
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once we get to kind of basic needs level, we have to start layering in intrinsic motivators
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to consistently achieve peak performance. Okay, so let's do a recap here. The big five intrinsic
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motivators that start you down the road to doing the impossible are be curious, and that gives you
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focus for free. After that, have a love or a passion. Then you want to couple that passion with something
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outside of yourself. Work to get the autonomy to pursue that purpose, and then hone your skills,
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hone the mastery to achieve great things. And this is a specific sequence you want ordered the right way,
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pointing the right direction. So, I mean, if you're following this sequence that you laid out,
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should someone who wants to write a book, for example, should they think, all right, I want to
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write a book, so I should write something that I'm curious about, what I'm passionate about, what I'm
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interested in, and I'm not going to worry about whether I'm going to make a lot of money if I'm going to
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get paid for it. And because I'm starting with my curiosity, those other intrinsic motivators will
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cascade down and build into peak performance. Yes. Yes is the answer to that question. Same thing with
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learning, right? So, learning works the same way. And I'm not saying don't write the book that's
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going to earn you money. I'm saying find a way to connect the thing that's going to earn you money
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to stuff you are foundationally curious about, one. And two, I will make an argument that if you're not
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foundationally curious about a subject and you're going to write a book and you think it's going to
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make you money, you're wrong. Like, it won't work because you're competing with too many people
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like myself who are very, very good at this, who've been doing this a long time. And I know
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that my passion for a subject comes through in the text. And it's very powerful to people who read it.
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People love it. It's one of the reasons people like reading my books. And I think that's true.
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It's not just me. It's across the boards. You want to have that. That's something,
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you know, that you have that's your own that your competitors don't have when it comes to writing a
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book. And I mean, you could apply this to let's say if you're, you're not thinking about writing
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a book or starting a business, but like in your own job, you could apply these principles to like
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instead of, you know, try to figure out some autonomy. For example, mastery is the big one that
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most people miss in their jobs. Autonomy and mastery are really like, you know, may, I mean,
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a lot of people may not have jobs that are totally lined up with their passion or their purpose.
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Those are, those are different issues, but often you can reframe, you know, I used to do this all
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the time when I was a young journalist, right? I would have to sort of write to save my life
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because I was paying my bills as a freelance journalist and I would have to produce tremendous
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amounts of copy about tons of subjects, including a lot of stuff that wasn't the sexiest stuff in the
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world for me. But I would always find something in the subject that I was curious about. And I would
00:23:36.940
also find something in the subject that if I, like I would try to, maybe I was writing an article.
00:23:42.660
I remember one, I remember one really great example and I pulled it off. I will never tell
00:23:47.020
you where the article appeared, but I had to write an article on data caves. It was very early on.
00:23:53.100
And I was writing about some of the earliest data caves. Now data caves are kind of neat,
00:23:57.660
but they're not super neat to me. But I used the assignment to learn to write in the writing style
00:24:05.140
of one of my favorite authors. And that's what I did. So I found a way to, yeah, I had to write
00:24:10.600
about something that wasn't super interesting to me, but I found something in the subject where I was
00:24:14.840
like, oh, this thing is interesting to me. I mean, I'm cool about this. Now, you know, I can definitely
00:24:19.800
like that piques my interest and I'm going to try to write it in a style that advances my cause,
00:24:27.540
my mastery cause, right? It stretches me outside my normal skillset, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah,
00:24:32.980
you can apply that stuff everywhere and you have to, you absolutely have to, because it's otherwise
00:24:37.460
you can't just, you can't generate enough energy for performing at your best. It just won't work
00:24:43.240
over time. You can fake it obviously for a little while, but not for a long time.
00:24:47.660
Yeah. That mastery component. That's something that motivated my dad throughout his career.
00:24:51.140
I remember when I was like 20 and I asked my dad, I was like, dad, he was a federal game warden
00:24:57.240
for the U S fish and wildlife service. And you know, growing up, I saw it like he did the exact same
00:25:01.380
thing every day. He had a season to his career during the fall winter. He was out checking duck
00:25:06.900
hunters, but then he was just going to work every day, same time, writing reports, talking to people,
00:25:13.100
investigating. And I remember asking him when I was 20, he's like, dad, how do you do that? Like
00:25:16.820
every day it's like the same thing. And he said, it's like, I just, what motivates me is I try to
00:25:22.100
get better and better every day. And I'm like, okay, that makes sense. And that, that, that, I mean,
00:25:27.540
he had a, he had a fruitful and he enjoyed his career and a fulfilling career.
00:25:31.380
Yeah. It's, there are certain conditions, you know, and later on in the book, I talk about
00:25:35.120
recovery and things like that. And thus I talk about burnout. There is, if you have a passive
00:25:41.880
aggressive boss who is constantly moving the goalposts, get out from under. That's just like,
00:25:48.580
there's not a whole lot in that particular situation. That's a, I want to figure out how to get a
00:25:54.400
different job situation, but in almost every other situation, the path of mastery and kind of
00:26:01.220
reframing stuff. So it aligns with fundamental goals and things like that is very effective.
00:26:06.560
It's a very effective way to get better. And, you know, any career I always say, I mean,
00:26:11.720
this is one of the hardest things I see for, for writers, for artists, for, I see it with coders,
00:26:18.800
any, anything where there's a sort of a creative skillset at the core of what you do,
00:26:22.600
what usually happens to people is in their twenties, twenties are when you get famous for
00:26:27.700
what you can do, right? Who you are, you get famous or well-known or you rise in your company,
00:26:34.100
et cetera, et cetera, based on who you are. Once you get to a certain level, nobody cares who you
00:26:40.700
are anymore. They now, now you have to like join a team and lift up the whole team. So for me,
00:26:47.600
it was super clear. I remember when I finally got, I was, I was roughly around 30 years old and I,
00:26:52.500
and I had sort of moved into the really like a big leagues for writing was working for the New York
00:26:57.900
Times, Sunday Magazine, Wired, that, that level. And I was already, I had published a bestselling book.
00:27:05.200
I, you know, I was a known writer. I had published, nobody cared. They wanted the best Wired magazine
00:27:11.100
story I could write. Nobody wanted a great Stephen Kotler story. And that's the, like,
00:27:15.380
that's the thirties in everybody's career, right? You end up like you can only take yourself so far
00:27:21.680
and you have to sort of hit yourself to a company or a thing. And then they want you to be creative
00:27:26.100
or work inside of their boxes for usually that phase lasts about a decade. And you can either
00:27:32.660
use it to move towards mastering your skills or not. You know what I mean? Like it's, it, there's not,
00:27:40.440
there are ways around it occasionally, I guess, but they're rare in careers and it's a long sort
00:27:47.040
of stop over. And if you don't figure that trick out, you're going to stall.
00:27:51.160
We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:27:53.240
And now back to the show. Okay. So the, we've been talking about these intrinsic motivators
00:28:01.000
and these can like, this is like basically free energy in a, in a sense, but like you also talk
00:28:05.180
about, there's this idea of grit and it's like when I'm, yeah, let's walk it, let's walk it all
00:28:10.600
the way through people. Cause I'll do it quickly. Sure. Once you have your five intrinsic motivators
00:28:16.580
set up and point in the direction, you have goals are next. You need three levels of goals in your
00:28:22.860
life for peak performance. You need mission level goals, what I call a massively transformative
00:28:27.560
purpose. You need high, hard goals. And then you need clear goals. A mission level is let's just
00:28:33.340
stick with your book writing example. I want to be the greatest writer in the history of the world.
00:28:37.020
That's a mission level goal. A high, hard goal is I want to go get a degree in journalism. I want to
00:28:43.200
write a book on chocolate. I want to book, write a book on weightlifting. I want to take your pick,
00:28:48.920
right? Those are high, hard goals. They're like one to five year projects. And then you need your
00:28:52.680
clear goals, your daily action plans. Now there's a specific sequence that clear goals should be
00:28:57.640
set in and there's ways they should be said. There's a lot of formality that I go over in the
00:29:01.820
book. We can skip over that. But once you've got motivation gets you into the game, goals tell you
00:29:07.040
where you're going and then you're going to need grit because the motivation is going to run out and not
00:29:12.200
all tasks are going to produce flow. And there are, it appears there are six levels of grit that we need to
00:29:18.760
train. And I suggest training them in a specific order predominantly because training grit, while
00:29:27.340
human beings are incredibly, incredibly, incredibly gritty creatures, we're far grittier than most
00:29:32.600
people ever, ever assume. But we don't often get there because there are these multiple levels of
00:29:40.160
grit. And if you're training them sort of out of sequence, it can be really demotivating.
00:29:45.400
And grit sort of starts with persistence and you want to start with physical persistence.
00:29:51.340
So the way that you want to start training grit is if you're working out in the gym and you're doing
00:29:55.660
three sets of 10, make one of those a set of 11. And then you're going to make two of them a set of
00:30:01.020
11 the next time you go back to the gym and maybe three, right? That sort of thing where you're just
00:30:04.660
pushing yourself a little farther than you normally go and over a very long regularly. The thing with
00:30:12.300
grit is it's not just enough to push yourself, you have to do it reliably and repeatedly so that the
00:30:19.140
brain starts to trust that that new level of energy is actually possible for you. Your body's a
00:30:26.120
homeostatic organism, right? It likes to burn the same amount of energy all the time. So when we have
00:30:32.700
to be grittier, we're saying, no, no, no, meet the next moment with more energy than normal. That's a big
00:30:38.720
thing for the body. The body doesn't like to do that. So we have to do that reliably and repeatedly
00:30:43.320
over time. So we start to trust ourselves. Once you have physical grit, you start working on mental
00:30:50.000
grit. And ultimately you're going towards the grit to sort of control your thoughts and cause a rein in
00:30:57.800
your negative thinking and a bunch of stuff like that. Then you need the grit to be your best when
00:31:02.640
you're at your worst. That's another grit and it needs to be trained independently. Then once you
00:31:08.520
sort of started to layer that in, you can start working on the grit to train up your weaknesses.
00:31:14.800
That's a very demotivated, it's very key to peak performance because everybody's got weaknesses and
00:31:20.740
in crisis situations, we will, the weaknesses are what's going to sink us, right? And, but they're
00:31:27.060
really hard to train because we're, there are weaknesses for very clear. So not aligned with
00:31:33.040
our curiosity, our value. Like those are the things that are totally outside of our motivation
00:31:37.160
that we fricking hate. So you don't want to start working on your weaknesses until all your motivation
00:31:43.300
is lined up and you've got other grit skills because otherwise it'll crush all that earlier work you've
00:31:49.580
done. Then there's also the grit to face your fear, which I think it's foundational to peak
00:31:55.980
performance. As I'm sure you know, often people start training it too early. If fear is phenomenal,
00:32:02.280
think about all the focus you get for free, when you can start to use fear as a motivator,
00:32:07.280
but you can't start to really, really work with the stuff that terrifies you until you've established
00:32:12.700
a bunch of other sort of grit skills. And then the last grit is actually the grit to recover.
00:32:17.920
And I'm talking about active recovery protocols. And the issue here is peak performers. And when I say
00:32:25.460
peak performers, I'm also talking about where, if you were, if you started with curiosity and you
00:32:29.620
worked your way to this point in the sequence, you are kind of, you're now approaching life with
00:32:35.200
way more fuel, way more energy. And you're starting to move into that category. Peak performers don't
00:32:40.520
like to take any time off. Time off feels like laziness, right? It feels like slowing down. Like,
00:32:46.380
oh my God, what am I doing? This is wrong, right? I shouldn't be doing this. And that is also,
00:32:51.740
you know, when we work with, as I said, when I work with the military a lot,
00:32:56.300
this is the recovery is often where they have their biggest problems. Also with a lot of
00:33:00.500
professional athletes, they don't actually recover enough for what it is that they're doing. So I
00:33:07.100
think if recovery is a grit skill, there's specific ways to train recovery that are sort of covered in
00:33:10.960
the book, but that's the grit stack. And from there, we, you know, you, you jump next into learning,
00:33:17.840
but that's, that takes us through the motivation triad of drive, grit, and goals is what we've
00:33:23.960
covered so far, basically. Yeah. That grit of be your best at your worst. That one stood out to me
00:33:29.300
for some reason. I don't know why, but I- It stood out. Well, I, so this was a, that was a big wake up
00:33:34.440
call for me actually, because I was writing on grit. I was working on grit. I was tracking
00:33:38.180
the neuroscience of grit. And I was on the phone with Josh Waitzkin, brilliant peak performance mind.
00:33:46.120
And Josh said, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you're missing the most important one that I, that I work on.
00:33:51.480
And we started talking about it and he was totally right. And I started training it myself and I was,
00:33:58.200
it's not particularly hard to train. It's just incredibly unpleasant, but wow, is it, it's a
00:34:05.080
level of confidence. So much of peak performance is about confidence at a really subtle level.
00:34:10.980
A lot of the grit skills, right? It's not just about the grit that you're building up,
00:34:17.440
the ability to persist, but it's the confidence that you get from the grit that may be even be
00:34:23.260
the bigger deal. And once you start training being your best, when you're at your worst,
00:34:28.560
wow, does it calm you down in some previously high stress situations? That's for sure.
00:34:34.140
Yeah. I've incorporated this with my, with my weight training. Like sometimes I'll still train even
00:34:38.460
when I'm tired because like, it's just for the habit and I enjoy it, but also there's something
00:34:44.560
about like, you learn how to perform even when you're not feeling the best.
00:34:49.120
That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And I, and it's, and it's super, super key.
00:34:54.520
And I think by the way, people who are athletes who have long, you know, histories in their life of
00:35:01.000
athletics, sooner or later you learn some of those skills, right? Cause athletics demands them.
00:35:06.600
But if that wasn't your, your path to wherever you are, it, you know, you're probably, you're
00:35:13.100
probably, there's a gap or two there. All right. So we've talked about motivation.
00:35:16.820
The next thing that separates peak performers from the rest and doing the impossible is they
00:35:21.680
continually learn and you have this great section. And again, you're, you're picking up where your
00:35:26.720
motivation left off. You want to follow your curiosity. You make this really compelling case
00:35:30.860
on continual learning about reading books to learn instead of just reading blog posts or watching a
00:35:37.620
YouTube video, which is most people with, that's what they want to do when they want to learn
00:35:40.340
something. Why, why, why read books? And like, what's your process for picking books on learning
00:35:45.820
a new subject or, you know, learning more about a subject you're already interested in?
00:35:49.860
So there's two sides to this, right? Let me speak to learning for half a second from a bigger
00:35:55.580
picture before we dive into this. Um, only cause I just find it helpful. So flow is peak performance.
00:36:03.020
We, we cleared that up at the start. The more time you bend and flow, the farther you're going to get
00:36:08.720
faster, right? Flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. The most important one is
00:36:15.920
known as the challenge skills balance. Simple idea is this flow follows focus. It shows up when most of
00:36:23.220
our attention, all of our attention is on the task at hand, right? When we're totally focused on the
00:36:28.300
thing that we're doing and we're pushing our skills to the utmost, we're using our skills to the utmost.
00:36:34.660
This is the challenge skills balance, right? We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the
00:36:39.660
challenge of the task at hand slightly exceeds our skillset. So you want to sort of stretch, but not
00:36:45.120
snap. For that to happen, if you're using your skills to the utmost, the most important thing you can
00:36:51.360
do to maximize flow, you're going to be learning. That's the only way you can use your skills to the
00:36:56.980
utmost. It requires learning to onboard those skills and then accelerated learning when you're using them
00:37:02.560
to the utmost. If you do not have solid learning skills, you're going to have really sustained
00:37:10.420
problems right at this spot. So you may have dialed in motivation. You may have set the proper goals.
00:37:17.240
You may be gritty, but if you can't learn, you can't actually keep up with the acceleration that
00:37:23.820
Furrow provides. And so one of the first questions you've got to ask is, what the hell should I learn
00:37:31.180
from, right? What are the best learning materials? And to answer that question, there's a section as
00:37:36.160
you refer to it as the ROI on reading, the return on investment. And what I do is I just pointed out
00:37:43.880
from an author's point of view, the time investment and the information density that results in every
00:37:51.180
kind of version of media that people might consume. For example, a blog. I write a blog.
00:37:58.180
Now, I write a blog. It's 1,200 words long. It's going to take me two days. I'm going to work on it
00:38:05.140
for three or four hours on day one. I'm going to read. I probably have read a bunch to get in there,
00:38:10.600
but I'll talk to a couple of experts and I'll write for about four hours. The next day,
00:38:17.240
I'll talk to another expert and I'll write for about four more hours. So average reading speed
00:38:22.220
is about 250 words a minute. Average blog is, let's say this blog is 1,000 words long. It's going to
00:38:31.680
take you four minutes to read that. So I give you about eight hours of my life and my brain power,
00:38:37.980
and you give me four minutes. That seems like a kind of cool trade. But then you go up to the
00:38:43.260
level of like a magazine article, say what I would write for Wired. These articles are about 5,000
00:38:49.480
words long. So they're going to take the average reader about 20 minutes. How long does it take me
00:38:54.020
to write one? Well, for an article for Wired, I'm going to do about a month's worth of research on the
00:38:59.740
front end. Then I'm going to report the actual story. And that's probably going to take about three
00:39:04.320
months. And then it's probably going to take two to three months for me to write it. And you're going
00:39:08.620
to have the benefit of my editor, the publisher, and a fact checker, and probably a couple other
00:39:15.000
people. So you're going to get four or five brains on the problem. Plus, instead of interviewing two
00:39:20.900
people for a magazine article, I'll interview 25 to 30. So you get 35 people's brains, roughly eight
00:39:28.300
months of work, and it costs you 20 minutes. So clearly, a magazine article for information
00:39:35.100
density, and for kind of brainpower, it's a much better return on investment. You're getting so
00:39:40.860
much more. A book, Art of Impossible, Art of Impossible is a book based on 30 years of research.
00:39:47.040
It's based on hundreds, if not thousands of interviews. It's the components of the book have
00:39:56.440
appeared in dozens and dozens and dozens of publications. Hundreds, if not thousands of
00:40:02.940
people's brainpower has gone into Art of Impossible. And it's going to take you about seven hours to read.
00:40:09.720
You can get 30 years of my life for seven hours. You can get eight months of my life for 20 minutes,
00:40:15.160
or you can get two days of my life for four minutes. That's the ROI on reading. And
00:40:22.200
listening to YouTube videos, podcasts, they're maybe better than a blog, but they're not nearly
00:40:29.700
as dense as a magazine article. They're somewhere in between. They're not a particularly good investment
00:40:35.060
either. So if you're looking for learning, books are the densest form of information available on the
00:40:44.100
planet. They're just the most bang for your buck for your time. Books, as one of my first mentors used
00:40:50.900
to say, books are where they keep the secrets. And you also, you lay out this sequence you follow
00:40:55.940
in picking out books to read that I actually, I followed myself. Like when I've researched
00:41:01.040
articles, I've done the exact same thing. And it's basically, you start off, you find a book that's
00:41:05.260
popular, the kind of book you'd find in an airport, read that, it's easy. And then you just get more and
00:41:10.520
more dense, more difficult until you're basically reading journal articles and science journals.
00:41:16.120
Yeah. Cause you want to like a lot of learning, just how the brain learns is about kind of figuring
00:41:23.140
out what is the vocabulary of a subject and sort of what is the history, the chronology of a subject,
00:41:29.340
the ordering of the ideas, right? Any, anything you're trying to learn was a voyage of discovery
00:41:33.920
for people that somebody had a question. Somebody answered that question, led to another question,
00:41:37.420
led to another. So like that's, you could consider that, that, that because the brain naturally,
00:41:42.960
our brains are natural storytellers. We link cause with effect automatically, right? Cause that's
00:41:48.860
survival. So historical narratives, this came first, this came second, this came third.
00:41:55.140
We automatically understand the brain knows how to do that. You don't have to work as hard. And
00:41:59.680
once you have this historical narrative, you have the big Christmas tree, and then you can start
00:42:03.600
hanging ornaments. And the truth of the matter, as you know, cause you've learned a bunch of difficult
00:42:07.460
subjects, some colossal amount of the actual information in a subject, depending on the
00:42:13.420
subject, but definitely over 40% and pretty much any subject is contained in the language of the
00:42:18.900
subject, right? And it's not even a whole lot of language. It's usually a lot less vocabulary than
00:42:23.900
you actually think you need to learn. So I always start there, like start with the most fun thing,
00:42:29.740
follow, follow your curiosity through the subject. And I think the most important thing for people to
00:42:35.620
know is as you get into harder and harder books, people make this mistake. They think there's a
00:42:42.340
quiz later, right? And they, like, if they don't understand something, they stop and they reread and
00:42:47.920
they take notes and that blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff. And that's actually, you're fighting
00:42:53.640
how your brain naturally learns. The best way to learn a subject is to follow your curiosity through
00:42:59.180
the subject. Take notes around the things that naturally catch your attention because that
00:43:04.980
naturally will produce a lot of norepinephrine, which primes the brain for learning. And you'll
00:43:10.180
have an easier time remembering it. Those are the things. So the big point for a lot of people is
00:43:15.840
as you read your way through a subject, don't get mad at yourself if you don't understand everything.
00:43:21.200
There's no way you're going to understand everything. It's a new subject. And don't try and don't get mad
00:43:26.820
and don't, like, just keep going because learning is unconscious. Even if you're lost, your brain is
00:43:36.620
All right. So we've talked about motivation. We talked about learning. The third component of
00:43:40.740
peak performance is creativity. Tell us about that. What's going on there?
00:43:44.640
Yes. Well, so simply put, everybody's going to get this really quickly. High, hard goals. By
00:43:49.940
definition, I'm at point A. It's a high, hard goal or a mission level goal because I don't know how to
00:43:55.060
get there. Right? Like, I don't know how to get there. So if you don't know how to get there,
00:43:59.340
you need creativity, creative problem solving because you need to steer. That's what creativity
00:44:05.800
is in the equation. Learning, motivation gets you in the game. Learning allows you to continue to play.
00:44:11.500
Creativity is how you steer. And creativity is where things like learning and like motivation,
00:44:20.780
these are invisible skills. Right? They're not visible things. And most of what is required
00:44:27.800
for creativity is a shift in states of consciousness less than a set of skills. So it's tricky to learn
00:44:36.140
how to think creatively and how to be more creative, but it's foundational, both, you know,
00:44:42.000
short-term in the moment, how am I creative now? And then what I call, and did some extensive
00:44:47.320
research on long-haul creativity. What does it take to say in creativity over a long career, which,
00:44:53.520
you know, it's interesting when I got interested in this question of long-haul creativity, because it's
00:44:58.500
very not, it's not studied very much. There's a lot of stuff on, how can I be more creative for the
00:45:04.100
project I'm working on? Right? Or I'm going to spend the next 10 years of my life doing a podcast.
00:45:09.700
How can I be creative doing this podcast? Like people think that way, but they don't think,
00:45:14.220
oh my God, I'm going to have to reinvent myself and reinvent myself and reinvent myself.
00:45:17.740
And yet when you meet people, whatever the field who have had really long careers,
00:45:22.440
most people have had to reinvent themselves seven, eight times. And I think that's with technology
00:45:28.640
today, I think that's going to speed up a little bit. Right. And so we're going to need to be able
00:45:35.000
to, we're going to need that creativity and we're going to need to sustain that creativity over the
00:45:39.640
long haul. And there's a whole different set of skills required for that, but that's the creative
00:45:45.340
component in the picture. And again, where does flow fit in all this? Like, does flow just kind of
00:45:49.620
come in every now and then to supercharge this stuff? Well, flow shows up every step of the way.
00:45:55.960
And so for example, creativity, which when I say the term creativity, I'm actually technically
00:46:02.140
talking about the definition of creativity, which is the creation and novel ideas that are useful.
00:46:09.480
And when you break that apart, because actually at a skillset level, that's idea generation,
00:46:15.540
problem identification, right? There's, there's actually tons of sub steps in between
00:46:20.100
that also sort of go into this component. Now on the flow side, I will say creativity
00:46:25.360
is a flow trigger. What I'm, what I actually mean by that is the experience of insider intuition,
00:46:31.240
which is when the brain links two novel ideas together or a new idea with an old idea to produce
00:46:37.460
something startling the new, that experience of insight produces a little bit of dopamine. We've all had
00:46:42.440
this experience. You've done a crossword puzzle. You get an answer, right? That's your brain. That's
00:46:46.660
doing pattern recognition. And when you get an answer, right? That little rush of pleasure, that's
00:46:51.540
dopamine. It's rewarding, right? It's rewarding you finding a pattern because that's good for survival.
00:46:58.680
And interestingly, dopamine, norepinephrine does this as well, but dopamine really does this.
00:47:03.540
It tunes, signal the noise ratios in the brain, which is a fancy way of saying,
00:47:07.960
we find more patterns. When you notice more signal instead of noise, you find more patterns.
00:47:16.500
So creativity triggers flow and then flow triggers creativity. And it's a, it's a positive feedback
00:47:23.740
loop. So as you start to, and same thing with learning, right? We talked about the challenge,
00:47:27.840
skills balance. So as you start to layer these things in more, all the curiosity, passion, purpose,
00:47:34.260
autonomy, autonomy, and mastery, not only are those our five intrinsic motivators, they're also all flow
00:47:38.720
triggers. So what you're doing as you, as you're moving along this thing, you're layering in more
00:47:45.260
and more flow triggers into your daily life, you're going to get more flow as a result. So yes, flow is
00:47:53.000
coming along much more reliably and repeatedly as you move along to amplify all your efforts. And
00:47:59.760
this flow is where we're going to go next. Let's just talk about that amplification. Let me put some
00:48:03.840
numbers on things so people understand what we're talking about. And these, I'll try to give credit
00:48:09.020
to, because these are not all my numbers. This work was done by a lot of different people. And I'll
00:48:13.000
try to point you at who did the research. For example, McKinsey studied top executives over the
00:48:18.660
course of 10 years, and they were looking at productivity. They were running around the world.
00:48:22.180
And this is a self-reported number. So grain of salt a little bit, but they did a lot of work and they
00:48:27.720
talked to a lot of people. And on average, top executives reported being 500% more productive in flow.
00:48:32.880
That's enormous. That means you go to work on Monday, you spend Monday in a flow state,
00:48:37.040
you take Tuesday through Friday off and get as much done as everybody else. Two days a week,
00:48:41.520
you're 1000% more productive than the competition. That's flow's impact on motivation, productivity,
00:48:46.860
learning. And this is work that was done predominantly by the Department of Defense.
00:48:50.820
They find that soldiers in flow, for example, will learn 240% faster than normal. Other studies have
00:48:56.920
taken that all the way as high as 500% faster than normal, but it sort of depends. Creativity,
00:49:02.220
a lot of different people that worked on this will spike 400% to 700%. And then we see a bunch of
00:49:08.080
additional things, cooperation, collaboration, empathy, environmental awareness, which is basically
00:49:13.800
our ability to perceive the natural world, and a whole bunch of physical skills. You get strength,
00:49:17.920
you get stamina, and you also get fast twitch muscle response, and it deadens the pain response.
00:49:22.220
So that's all the stuff that gets amplified in flow. And we could talk about why if you want to. We
00:49:29.880
understand the biology underneath that. But when you say, yes, you get more flow along the way,
00:49:37.820
that's a big deal. That was the point of all this. That's not a small thing. And because flow is
00:49:45.400
directly tied to happiness, well-being, meaning, and purpose, meaning the more flow you get,
00:49:50.160
the higher you, the more well-being, happiness, meaning, and purpose, and things like that you
00:49:54.200
get, you know, it ends up being this incredibly positive self-reinforcing cycle.
00:49:59.820
What I thought was interesting, you had this great section in the book where, you know,
00:50:02.560
throughout the book, you've been highlighting all this modern research, scientific research about
00:50:06.300
how to perform at your peak. Then you found that 150 years ago, German philosopher,
00:50:12.540
Friedrich Nietzsche, basically kind of talking about the same thing with his philosophy.
00:50:20.220
So one, well, I have a minor in philosophy. So this is, you know, this is something I have a
00:50:25.980
long-time fascination. My chief scientist is also, before he was a neuro guy, is a philosophy major.
00:50:33.820
He's got a huge Nietzsche tattoo on his shoulder. Like, we're big Nietzsche fans at Flow Research
00:50:38.920
Collective in general. But Nietzsche is important because, one, I said peak performance is nothing
00:50:45.300
more than getting your biology to work for you rather than against you. And it's a limited set
00:50:49.280
of skills, as we've been talking about, right? So Nietzsche was the first guy to come after Darwin.
00:50:53.880
Darwin said, hey, the body evolves, and we got to use science to study this. And Nietzsche and a
00:50:59.700
couple other people went, holy crap, mind evolves. And Nietzsche was interested in peak performance,
00:51:04.960
right? Well, everybody's familiar with the term, the ubermensch, the Superman, right? That was his
00:51:10.200
whole project. How do we turn humans into Superman? Or my favorite Nietzsche quote, which is, man is
00:51:16.240
something that needs to be overcome. What have you done today to overcome him? And, you know, he wants
00:51:22.140
to rise above our kind of foundational nature, in a sense. And Nietzsche came to a four-step process,
00:51:28.900
and it's the same freaking process we've been talking about. His process starts with motivation,
00:51:33.600
right? Find an organizing idea for your life. In other words, get all your intrinsic motivators
00:51:38.520
point in the same direction. He then goes into suffering is mandatory because you have to learn
00:51:44.360
grit skills. And then learning and creativity come next. And then what do you use to turbo boost the
00:51:51.160
whole goddamn thing? Flow. Only Nietzsche didn't call it flow. He called it Rausch, which is German for
00:51:57.400
overflowing joy. So it's the same formula. It hasn't changed in 150 years because the biology is
00:52:03.580
the same. Well, so we've been talking about the formula big picture. But for those who are,
00:52:09.580
we're about to start, we're starting a new year. Like, what are some things that people can do,
00:52:13.260
a few suggestions that people can do on a daily or weekly basis to start accomplishing that,
00:52:18.160
you know, maybe the small line possible in their life in 2021?
00:52:20.780
So, I mean, there's a lot, right? Like what you end up finding is that peak performance is seven
00:52:26.460
things you want to do every day and about six things you want to do every week. There's a bunch
00:52:30.920
of onboarding processes, but what it comes down to is about seven daily practices and five to six
00:52:38.420
weekly practices. Most of the daily practices are very short, five minutes here, five minutes there,
00:52:43.960
25 minutes here. And the biggest one is you got to, this is where we'll start. If you're not sleeping
00:52:48.940
seven, eight hours a night, forget about it. You just can't do this work. The body needs seven to
00:52:54.560
eight hours of sleep a night. There are people who think, oh, I can get by on less. Go take some
00:52:59.480
cognitive tests when you're tired and see how you perform. They're all over online. Just see,
00:53:04.640
test your cognitive function when awake versus a little tired versus a lot tired. You'll be shocked.
00:53:11.140
You'll sleep seven, eight hours a night. It's fast enough. I'm going to start there. And the
00:53:16.580
second thing I'm going to say after that, everybody has a primary flow activity. This is that thing you
00:53:23.580
did as a child that just produced a ton of flow. I don't care if it was staring at dinosaur skeletons
00:53:30.420
in the natural history museum, learning to dance to hip hop, building model airplanes, doing gymnastics,
00:53:37.220
skateboarding, whatever it was. There was something that, you know, whenever you did it, it just sucked
00:53:43.780
your brain in and you just totally dropped in. And it's a very reliable source of flow in your life. This
00:53:49.220
primary flow activity usually gets set down by adults. As we get more responsible, we stopped doing our
00:53:55.780
highest flow activities, right? And the thing is, two things that are important to me here. One, the more flow
00:54:02.140
you get, the more flow you get. Flow is a focusing skill. It's a kind of way of paying attention to
00:54:07.620
the thing that you're doing. So if I go skiing on Monday and drop into a flow state and then go to
00:54:12.480
work on Thursday, I've got a better chance of getting into flow. A. B. The massively heightened
00:54:19.080
creativity you see in flow, 400 to 700 percent, this is Teresa Mobley's work at Harvard, outlasts the flow
00:54:24.740
state by a day, maybe two. So you will get more flow in general and more creativity simply for just
00:54:33.300
doubling down on this activity. And the amount, when you move into flow, it resets the nervous system,
00:54:40.500
meaning all the stress hormones in the body are flushed out of your system. They're replaced by a
00:54:44.640
lot of positive, feel-good neurochemistry. If you are running hot, if you are anxious, if it has been a
00:54:50.720
tough year and I don't know anybody who got through 2020, 2021, and it wasn't a tough year,
00:54:55.640
you know what I mean? You're probably running hot, so you've got to relieve that anxiety. These are
00:55:00.400
just the two simplest things that I think are really important. I like to end my day by creating
00:55:07.120
a clear goals list for the next day. Huge lift, especially if we're working from home. Start with
00:55:13.000
your hardest task and figure out how many things you can do in a day and be excellent at them. That's how
00:55:18.400
many items go on your clear goals list. And anything that's going to take energy. You've got to have a
00:55:22.220
tough conversation with your boyfriend or girlfriend or wife or husband. That goes on the list. You've got to
00:55:26.800
walk the dog. That goes on. Anything that burns energy that you've got to be present for goes on the list
00:55:32.020
kind of thing. Clear goals list. End your day practicing some distraction management, meaning turn off
00:55:40.680
anything that's going to distract you from kind of your first high hardest task in the morning. And then clear
00:55:47.100
goals list. Start with the hardest task, work to your easiest task. That follows kind of the way our
00:55:52.560
energy works throughout the day, et cetera, et cetera. Those are just a handful of quick tips I can keep
00:55:57.160
going. Well, people can find a ton more details on these practices and everything else we've talked
00:56:01.920
about in your book. And there's a lot of really interesting insights in it. We scratched the surface
00:56:06.340
today. So where can people go to learn more about the book and the rest of your work?
00:56:10.760
First of all, you can go to theartofimpossible.com, which is kind of the webpage for the book.
00:56:16.420
And by this way, if you want to learn all the kind of ins and outs of the book, check out the blog
00:56:20.760
section on that website because there's tons of stuff up there. StephenCottler.com will get you
00:56:26.320
all things, me, all the, you know, there's 13 other books, et cetera. And if you're interested in flow
00:56:32.980
stuff, flowresearchcollective.com. And one more thing I want to, you asked what else can people do?
00:56:38.220
So as your primary flow activity, if you go to flowblocker.com, www.flowblocker.com,
00:56:47.660
we built a giant diagnostic at the Flow Research Collective. There are six major blockers of flow
00:56:53.120
that most people, and most people have one or two of them in their life, but there's usually
00:56:57.140
one main one. And we just built a diagnostic and we're giving it away for free because it's a really
00:57:02.080
like if you double down on your primary flow activity and you sort of take the flow blocker
00:57:06.300
diagnostic and remove the one thing that's really sort of standing between you and more flow,
00:57:12.780
those two things alone will start turning up the knob on flow. And literally like just creating a
00:57:19.040
clear goals list at the end of the day, maybe a little bit of a distraction management at the end
00:57:24.720
of the day. So you're kind of ready to dive into your next day and getting seven, eight hours of sleep
00:57:29.920
and night. There's a bunch of other things in the book that you can kind of look at, but that's a
00:57:32.920
really, that's a really simple, basic playlist that anybody can start with. And it's a fun,
00:57:38.040
sort of a fun playlist. You know what I mean? Right. As opposed to some of the other stuff.
00:57:42.700
Well, Stephen, it's been a great conversation. Thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:57:46.360
Thank you so much for your interest. I appreciate it.
00:57:49.880
My guest today was Stephen Kotler. He's the author of the new book, The Art of Impossible,
00:57:53.980
a peak performance primer. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Go pick up a
00:57:57.820
copy today. It's a great book to start 2021 off with. Also, you can find out more information
00:58:01.860
about his work at his website, stephenkotler.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash
00:58:06.560
art of impossible, where you find links to resources, where you delve deeper into this topic.
00:58:17.680
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:58:21.420
artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles
00:58:24.960
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00:58:50.920
this is Brett McKay, reminding you not only to listen to the AOM podcast,