The Art of Manliness - How to Do the Impossible This Year

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.060 There are goals in life that seem very attainable, and then there are goals which seem practically

00:00:15.160 impossible. Rising out of poverty or overcoming a traumatic childhood, becoming a bestselling

00:00:19.900 author, deadlifting 500 pounds. With impossible goals, the odds seem long and it isn't clear

00:00:24.840 how to get from point A to point B. My guest today has spent decades figuring out the roadmap

00:00:29.300 for making that journey. His name is Steven Kotler. He's a peak performance expert, the

00:00:33.340 executive director of the Flow Research Collective, and the author of numerous books, including

00:00:37.240 his latest, The Art of Impossible, a peak performance primer. Today on the show, Steven talks about

00:00:42.000 how he defines an impossible goal and then unpacks the formula for making the impossible possible.

00:00:46.840 That formula begins with harnessing the five big intrinsic motivators that will give you

00:00:50.540 focus for free and what you need to activate in a certain sequence, and then moves through

00:00:54.380 the six levels of grit that should be trained in a particular order as well. We discuss the

00:00:58.440 importance of creativity and continual learning, and how to assess the ROI of your reading.

00:01:02.660 Steven also explains how flow amplifies the process of achieving peak performance, and

00:01:06.580 why you need to rediscover the primary flow activity from your childhood. At the end of

00:01:10.140 our conversation, Steven shares some things you begin doing today to start tackling your

00:01:13.980 impossible goals. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash

00:01:18.180 art of impossible. Steven joins you now via clearcast.io.

00:01:28.440 All right, Steven Kotler, welcome back to the show.

00:01:36.080 It's good to be with you.

00:01:37.300 So we had you on the show back in 2014. It's been almost seven years when we talked to you

00:01:43.240 about your book, The Rise of Superman, which is all about decoding the science of flow, which

00:01:49.880 is this optimal state of attention that time slows down and you're able to perform at peak

00:01:56.300 performance. You got a new book out called The Art of the Impossible. How is this book,

00:02:02.360 big picture, how is this book, your new one, Art of Impossible, a continuation of your thinking

00:02:06.820 and research that you did in The Rise of Superman?

00:02:09.400 Steven Kotler It's a great question. So Art Impossible is a

00:02:12.840 peak performance primer. And one, the first thing that distinguishes it, unlike The Rise of

00:02:18.980 Superman, which was built around stories, predominantly athletes accomplishing impossible feats using

00:02:25.120 flow and other kind of cognitive peak performance skills to really overcome incredible odds and

00:02:30.700 accomplish possible feats. Flow is one portion, it's actually like one quarter of the full kind of

00:02:39.000 cognitive peak performance picture. And one of the things we learned in training flow, first of all,

00:02:44.440 Art of Impossible is not a, or a, The Rise of Superman is by no means a how-to. It's a storytelling

00:02:49.960 book, right? It's about flow. It's got a ton of information, but it is not, you don't come away

00:02:55.240 going, oh, I immediately know step A, step B, step C, here's how I apply this stuff in my life.

00:03:00.900 And big picture, the truth of the matter is if your interest is in peak performance,

00:03:06.420 flow is necessary, but not sufficient. And there's other things that are also required. In fact,

00:03:13.180 most of the sub-skills that are optimized in flow, motivation, grit, goal-setting skills,

00:03:20.520 learning skills, creativity, and problem-solving skills, if you don't have a very solid foundation

00:03:26.500 in these skills as well, it's very difficult. Flow is an enormous uptick in performance,

00:03:33.900 you know, hundreds of percentiles above normal. But if you don't have the skills,

00:03:40.420 the actual skills that flow is going to optimize, if they're not laid in, you're going to have a

00:03:44.960 problem sustaining the state, really using it for extended long-term peak performance.

00:03:51.480 And of course, because there are a lot of times when flow just doesn't show up,

00:03:54.920 you're not going to have the requisite skills to keep going without flow. So flow is necessary,

00:03:59.740 but not sufficient. I wanted to do a full picture. This is the full suite. This is everything that is

00:04:04.860 involved in cognitive peak performance. And it turns out, when you look at the full suite,

00:04:08.620 when you look at the big picture, what you find out is, not surprisingly, it's a sequence. It's a

00:04:15.120 system. It's all of our biology, essentially. And peak performance is nothing more than getting

00:04:19.540 our biology to work for us rather than against us. And it turns out, when you look at all of those

00:04:23.920 things, and especially from a neurobiological point of view, which is the work I do, you start to

00:04:29.500 realize, oh, wow, these things work together in an order, in a sequence. If you're interested in

00:04:34.540 really maximizing performance, these things are much more effective. You go farther,

00:04:41.800 faster, and with less work if you're doing all this stuff at once rather than just trying to

00:04:46.760 utilize flow, for example. So there's a formula to doing the impossible.

00:04:51.900 Let's define the impossible.

00:04:53.520 Yeah. What is the impossible?

00:04:54.220 What do you mean by the impossible?

00:04:55.380 And then the answer is yes, but that sounds freaking absurd if I don't define the impossible

00:05:00.660 first. So my career has been spent studying people in all walks of life, in all domains,

00:05:07.500 in all fields, in all areas who have accomplished what you could call capital I impossible, right?

00:05:13.040 This is doing that which has never been done before. And these could be physical impossibles,

00:05:19.000 four-minute miles. These could be intellectual impossibles, Einstein's theory of relativities.

00:05:23.920 These could be cultural impossibles, Rosa Parks sitting at the front of the bus.

00:05:27.280 Doesn't really matter because across the board, you see the same things. But the book is meant to be

00:05:33.800 applied by anybody who is interested in accomplishing what I have called small-I impossible.

00:05:40.760 Small-I impossible is all that stuff that we truly believe is impossible for ourselves.

00:05:48.080 There are lots of examples here. Rising out of poverty is a small-I impossible. Overcoming deep

00:05:55.120 trauma, small-I impossible. Becoming world-class in whatever you do, that's small-I impossible.

00:06:01.900 When I was growing up in Cleveland, Ohio in the blue-collar 70s, and I wanted to be a writer from

00:06:08.120 the time I was four or five years old, I didn't know any writers. I didn't know anybody who was a

00:06:12.220 writer. I didn't know how you became a writer. It was like I woke up one morning and looked at my

00:06:15.640 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

00:06:20.340 hobbit when I grow up, right? It was roughly the same kind of career trajectory in terms of like,

00:06:24.620 how do you get from A to B? So that's what I mean by small-I impossible. It's those things we

00:06:29.300 believe are impossible for us where there is no clear path between point A where we are and point

00:06:34.620 B where we want to go, and statistically, little chances of success. That said, the book is applicable

00:06:40.800 to anybody who's interested in increasing peak performance, but the actual system and sequence

00:06:45.780 is designed for anybody interested in going after high, hard goals, exceeding their limitations,

00:06:51.160 exceeding their expectations, and really turning their biggest dreams into their most recent

00:06:55.680 achievements. That's what the focus is. All right. So it's the formula to achieve both

00:07:01.160 big-I impossible, small-I impossible. But why do you think so many people fail to live up? Like,

00:07:07.180 why don't a lot of people figure out this formula on their own, like of achieving that small-I

00:07:11.400 impossible? Like, why do so many people fail to live up to their potential?

00:07:14.420 So here's the real answer as far as I can tell. When you talk to actual peak performers, and I

00:07:20.540 know, you know, I'm familiar with your show and your audience that, you know, you've got some hard

00:07:24.700 chargers who listen to you on a regular basis. What happens when those folks read The Art of

00:07:29.820 Impossible, and enough have at this point that I think I can speak learnedly about this, or a little

00:07:34.840 bit learnedly, is most people go, oh, wow, I was doing about 60, 65% of this stuff on my own. I

00:07:43.680 didn't even know it. Or I did, I was doing it intentionally, but I didn't know it was a

00:07:47.540 sequence. I didn't know how it was designed to work. And there are usually gaps in their game.

00:07:52.560 And it varies. You know what I mean? For example, I did a lot of work. I've done a lot of work with

00:07:57.380 the military and the US Special Forces and things like that. And their gaps tend to be around things

00:08:03.140 like creative problem solving and recovery, things that are not often kind of part of the kind of

00:08:09.480 military structure. They're starting to be, but they're not, they're not there. Other people,

00:08:14.120 a lot of most normal people tend to come off because they haven't optimized all of the different

00:08:20.860 quantities of intrinsic motivation. They don't have all their intrinsic motivators pointing in

00:08:24.560 the same direction. They don't have, there are six levels of grit, it appears, and they all seem to

00:08:30.580 be needed to be trained independently. And you may have a couple of them, but you may have gaps in the

00:08:35.020 chain. So a lot of it is that kind of stuff. Because as I said, peak performance is nothing

00:08:39.820 more than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. It's a limited suite of things,

00:08:45.080 but we all have weaknesses, right? All of us have weaknesses someplace. And that's usually

00:08:50.620 why we get derailed. It's not the whole picture. It's usually three or four elements in the big picture

00:08:59.060 that are missing. And that once we dial them in and start to understand how these things work,

00:09:04.900 together and how to get them to work together, that usually tends to be the problem.

00:09:09.580 Well, one thing you say in the book, you make a point about this idea that this is all about

00:09:12.920 harnessing your innate biology that I already have. So I want to go back to this idea. I mean,

00:09:17.200 what this is all about, what the rather than possible is about is helping people harness their

00:09:21.480 innate biological processes that allow them to perform at their peak. Something you say,

00:09:25.240 you said that biology scales, personality doesn't. What do you mean by that?

00:09:29.500 You've seen this a lot in peak performance. So unfortunately, fairly frequently in the world

00:09:37.440 of it's less done in the world of like the world I'm in, which is like really hardcore science back

00:09:42.640 peak performance stuff, but you see it a lot more in coaching and you see it all over self-help

00:09:47.900 people figure out works for them. And they try to teach other people, Hey, this worked for me.

00:09:53.620 Let me train you in it. Let me build a system. Let me build a company. And invariably

00:09:57.340 the vast majority of what works for you is not going to work for other people. And the reason is

00:10:03.880 when you're talking about peak performance, certain elements that are very foundational to

00:10:08.700 how you should approach peak performance. Like where are you on the introversion to extroversion scale

00:10:14.720 or how, what are your risk tolerances? These are things that are biologically hardwired at least to

00:10:21.820 50%, if not more, depending on whose numbers you're going by and shaped by very early childhood

00:10:26.980 experience. They're more in the category of biological traits. And we used to believe traits

00:10:31.780 were totally immutable. You're stuck. You're born with whatever, like where you are on the big five

00:10:35.780 personality index is you're going to stay there the rest of your life. We now know that's not true,

00:10:40.820 but as a general rule, if you want to change a trait, if you're very introverted and you want to become

00:10:45.600 very extroverted, it can take five to 10 years worth of work to do that. Now, somebody might be

00:10:52.800 interested in doing that work, but if you give them a peak performance system, right? And they

00:10:58.320 haven't done that work and they're very introverted and it was designed by an extrovert, they're going

00:11:03.200 to crash and burn. Same thing with risk tolerances, same thing with about seven or eight foundational

00:11:08.600 keys in peak performance. Biology, on the other hand, scales. When you go back, one way to think about

00:11:15.840 this that's maybe a little easier is when you talk about psychology and most of the terms that you get

00:11:23.060 out of coaching or self-help, if they're scientific at all, they come out of psychology. Psychology is

00:11:28.880 essentially a metaphor. So the simple example here is mindset. When most people in the world use the term

00:11:35.380 mindset, they mean attitude towards life. When psychologists use mindset, they actually mean

00:11:40.740 attitudes towards learning. And when neurobiologists use the term mindset, they are actually talking

00:11:48.320 about something that happens in the thalamus in the brain with thalamic gating, basically how

00:11:54.280 information that is entering the brain gets filtered and sort of top down gating, which is also how

00:12:00.680 information in the brain gets filtered. It's a very specific thing taking place within very specific

00:12:06.400 networks. And it means a very precise thing. The very precise thing that it means is what you need

00:12:13.120 to get the reaction you're looking for. You're not going to always get it when you're hearing it

00:12:19.840 psychologically. But when you take it down to mechanism, the basic biology, A plus B equals C

00:12:25.600 kind of thing, you get reliable, repeatable results for anyone. It doesn't matter who you are, which is why

00:12:31.440 we train at the Flow Research Collective about a thousand people a month. And we've been doing this for a

00:12:36.160 while at this point. That's a very large sample size. And we can tell you, we train everybody from the

00:12:43.860 U.S. Special Forces to Olympic and professional athletes through like soccer moms from Iowa and

00:12:49.880 insurance brokers from Kansas. When you go down to biology, it works for everyone. When you try to

00:12:57.940 stay at the level of the psychology, it's often going to exclude people. And when you come in from the

00:13:03.240 level of personality, you will often have a disaster. You'll just make turns. It either won't work for

00:13:09.760 very long or you'll create a big mess. All right, let's talk about this formula that goes down to

00:13:15.420 the biological level of peak performance. And the first part of this is motivation. And that's another

00:13:21.420 one of those words that gets thrown around a lot in the self-help community and psychology where

00:13:25.980 you got to be motivated. And you're like, what is motivation? Like what exactly? Yeah. What is

00:13:30.420 motivation? And why does it matter? Right? Like, okay, well, I want motivation and okay, but what is

00:13:36.860 it and why does it matter? Right? That's the question you're asking. Right. So first of all,

00:13:44.960 depending on who you talk to, but as general motivation is a psychological catch-all term for

00:13:50.600 three or four, depending on how you want to break them down categories of skills. One, there's

00:13:57.320 external and internal or extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation are things we

00:14:05.580 want that are outside of ourselves, money, sex, fame. Those are all extrinsic motivators.

00:14:11.940 Then there are intrinsic motivators. These are things that sort of motivate us automatically. And I'll

00:14:17.000 speak more to that in a second. Curiosity, mastery, autonomy, passion, and purpose are the biggest

00:14:23.220 five. There are others, but those are the big five. Simultaneously, when people talk about a

00:14:28.480 motivation, they're also talking about grit. And as I mentioned before, there are actually six levels

00:14:33.440 of grit skills and peak performers need to train sort of all of them. Now we're going to start with

00:14:39.720 intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. That's where the conversation starts. And why does motivation

00:14:44.580 matter? It's a great question. Let's start there. You have to actually back up one step and understand

00:14:50.440 that when it comes to peak performance, like real performance in the world, you have, as a human

00:14:55.620 being, very few big levers to reach for. In any given situation, the two things that you really have

00:15:04.340 is your focus. Where do you put your attention and what do you choose to ignore? And the action you're

00:15:09.420 going to take to accomplish whatever it is you're doing. If you put action and attention on the same

00:15:16.360 thing over and over and over again, you get a habit, right? And all a habit is, is it's the action

00:15:23.120 performed without the attention, right? You no longer have to focus on it because you've learned how to do

00:15:31.140 the thing and you can perform it unconsciously, which is great because when you can perform it

00:15:36.240 unconsciously, the brain is much more efficient. It has greater processing speed. A lot of things that

00:15:42.480 we need go up. So that's the big picture. When you talk about motivation, what you're really talking

00:15:50.320 about is those things like, remember action and focus are about the two biggest things we can work

00:15:55.780 with. It's not a hell of a lot you can do on the action side other than keep doing the action over

00:16:01.320 and over and over for years until you get better at it. Focus is your big lever. Motivation gives you

00:16:07.520 focus for free. It's a huge deal. Your brain is 2% of your body mass. It consumes at rest about 25%

00:16:15.120 of your energy. That's huge. When you're actually doing something, it goes up from there. So if you can

00:16:21.960 get focus for free, that's a big deal. Energetically, calorically, everything else. Think about

00:16:29.060 curiosity. Everything starts with curiosity. It's the foundational human motivator and it gives us a

00:16:37.100 little bit of focus for free. When we're curious about something, when you're interested in what

00:16:40.840 somebody is saying to you, it's not hard to pay attention to them. It happens automatically. When you're

00:16:46.000 into a subject, reading a book is not hard. You're psyched to read the book. You can't wait to get back to

00:16:51.720 the book, et cetera. But if you're trying to page through something that's really a textbook and

00:16:56.120 you're not into it, twice as much work. And think about curiosity. Neurobiologically,

00:17:03.440 curiosity is literally a little bit of the neurochemical norepinephrine and a little bit

00:17:07.900 of the neurochemical dopamine. That's all it is. Both of these are focusing. They do a lot of different

00:17:12.320 things in the brain. They're pleasure chemicals. So they reward our curiosity, right? Curiosity feeds

00:17:18.040 itself. What they mean is the chemicals that are produced by curiosity feel really, really good.

00:17:25.560 And curiosity breeds curiosity because of these neurochemicals. These neurochemicals drive focus,

00:17:33.240 right? That's what we're experiencing and excitement. That's the emotional side of it.

00:17:37.060 But they also prime the brain for learning. So when we're curious about something, it is much

00:17:42.200 easier to retain that information for later. And it goes up from there. The secret with curiosity

00:17:48.980 is passion is what follows curiosity. Passion is nothing more than the intersection of multiple

00:17:55.220 curiosities plus playing at that intersection and producing a series of wins. That's really the

00:18:02.340 foundational ingredients in passion. Neurobiologically, it's the same cocktail. Instead of a little bit of

00:18:08.300 norepinephrine and dopamine, you get a lot of norepinephrine and dopamine, in which case,

00:18:13.660 think about, I'll give you a simple example of passion. Think about romantic love. That is a

00:18:17.240 passion. Romantic love. This is, by the way, not my work. This particular bit is Helen Fisher's work

00:18:22.860 at Rutgers on the cocktails underneath love. But romantic love is essentially a lot of norepinephrine

00:18:29.080 and a lot of dopamine. When you were falling in love with somebody, we've all done that. We've all had

00:18:34.120 the experience. Think about how much attention you pay to that person, right? You can't even stop

00:18:38.620 thinking about them. That's the big deal with passion. And it sort of goes from there. Passion,

00:18:44.380 once we can take that passion and couple it to a purpose greater than ourselves, a cause outside of

00:18:49.880 ourselves, that's purpose. Once we have our purpose, what do you need next? It's obvious. You need the

00:18:55.620 freedom, the autonomy to pursue that purpose. And once you have the freedom and autonomy to pursue that

00:19:01.920 purpose, you need the skills to pursue it well, aka mastery. Those are our big five intrinsic

00:19:08.220 motivators. That is the order that they are designed to be created and utilized and that

00:19:13.980 they work best. And when they're all pointed in the same direction, a lot of good things happen,

00:19:18.880 including you get a ton of flow for a bunch of different reasons. But so not only do you get all

00:19:26.140 the benefits, focus for free, amplified learning, et cetera, et cetera, when everything's pointed in the

00:19:31.500 same direction, you also drop into flow far more easily and flow amplifies motivation, productivity,

00:19:39.660 creativity, learning, empathy, perception, a couple of other things. So it's a big boost and it's a huge

00:19:46.100 boost as well. So that's what I mean by there's an order and a sequence. And that's just on the

00:19:51.420 intrinsic motivation side. Though I will say the research does say that you want to start with

00:19:56.760 extrinsic motivation. You want to start with the external motivation up until the point that sort of you

00:20:01.440 your basic safety and security needs are met. If you're still struggling to make rent and pay your

00:20:08.100 bills and feed yourself, it's difficult to start cultivating curiosity. You can do it, but it's hard

00:20:15.020 because the system is sort of redlined. So what the research shows, and this is Dr. Daniel Kahneman's

00:20:21.640 research, we need basically to make enough money to cover our basic needs with a little left over

00:20:27.580 for discretionary spending. And once we get to that point, extrinsic, external motivators to

00:20:34.580 ourselves, while we still want those things, and they will still motivate us, they are not the best

00:20:41.020 way to drive increased performance and productivity and creativity and those things. In other words,

00:20:46.460 once we get to kind of basic needs level, we have to start layering in intrinsic motivators

00:20:52.240 to consistently achieve peak performance. Okay, so let's do a recap here. The big five intrinsic

00:20:58.720 motivators that start you down the road to doing the impossible are be curious, and that gives you

00:21:04.340 focus for free. After that, have a love or a passion. Then you want to couple that passion with something

00:21:10.620 outside of yourself. Work to get the autonomy to pursue that purpose, and then hone your skills,

00:21:16.900 hone the mastery to achieve great things. And this is a specific sequence you want ordered the right way,

00:21:22.240 pointing the right direction. So, I mean, if you're following this sequence that you laid out,

00:21:27.600 should someone who wants to write a book, for example, should they think, all right, I want to

00:21:32.320 write a book, so I should write something that I'm curious about, what I'm passionate about, what I'm

00:21:36.320 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

00:21:40.320 get paid for it. And because I'm starting with my curiosity, those other intrinsic motivators will

00:21:45.220 cascade down and build into peak performance. Yes. Yes is the answer to that question. Same thing with

00:21:51.100 learning, right? So, learning works the same way. And I'm not saying don't write the book that's

00:21:57.640 going to earn you money. I'm saying find a way to connect the thing that's going to earn you money

00:22:03.460 to stuff you are foundationally curious about, one. And two, I will make an argument that if you're not

00:22:10.660 foundationally curious about a subject and you're going to write a book and you think it's going to

00:22:14.260 make you money, you're wrong. Like, it won't work because you're competing with too many people

00:22:20.940 like myself who are very, very good at this, who've been doing this a long time. And I know

00:22:26.240 that my passion for a subject comes through in the text. And it's very powerful to people who read it.

00:22:33.000 People love it. It's one of the reasons people like reading my books. And I think that's true.

00:22:36.840 It's not just me. It's across the boards. You want to have that. That's something,

00:22:41.060 you know, that you have that's your own that your competitors don't have when it comes to writing a

00:22:46.060 book. And I mean, you could apply this to let's say if you're, you're not thinking about writing

00:22:50.020 a book or starting a business, but like in your own job, you could apply these principles to like

00:22:54.500 instead of, you know, try to figure out some autonomy. For example, mastery is the big one that

00:23:00.760 most people miss in their jobs. Autonomy and mastery are really like, you know, may, I mean,

00:23:06.040 a lot of people may not have jobs that are totally lined up with their passion or their purpose.

00:23:10.360 Those are, those are different issues, but often you can reframe, you know, I used to do this all

00:23:17.120 the time when I was a young journalist, right? I would have to sort of write to save my life

00:23:21.600 because I was paying my bills as a freelance journalist and I would have to produce tremendous

00:23:25.780 amounts of copy about tons of subjects, including a lot of stuff that wasn't the sexiest stuff in the

00:23:30.800 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

00:43:34.320 still picking up information. Just keep going.

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.

00:50:17.200 How did you make that connection?

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

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00:58:28.300 you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code

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00:58:47.360 show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. Until next time,

00:58:50.920 this is Brett McKay, reminding you not only to listen to the AOM podcast,

00:58:53.540 but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - January 04, 2021

How to Do the Impossible This Year

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