The Outworker
Stories of healing, personal development, and inner work. Founded on the idea that the relationship with oneself is the most important to develop, but the easiest to neglect, The Outworker shares conversations aimed at helping you develop that relationship.
The Outworker
#055 - Steven Kotler - Flow State, Peak Performance, & Doing The Impossible
Steven Kotler unpacks the neurobiology of flow and why accessing it consistently is the key to doing hard things well. We dive into the four-stage flow cycle, how frustration can be a sign you're on the right track, and why lasting change begins with what’s hardwired in all of us. He explains how to structure goals for momentum, why passion requires patience, and how consistency—not intensity—is what drives the impossible forward. Steven also opens up about pain, passion, purpose, and why chasing the impossible is less about big leaps and more about mastering repetition, recovery, and staying in the game.
Timestamps:
00:00 Coming Up As A Bartender
07:05 Difference Between Flow State & Peak Performance
09:48 Using Biology To Work For Us
12:20 Personality Doesn't Scale; Biology Scales
16:46 4 Stage Cycle Of Flow
24:57 Relationship Between Flow & Physical Pain
31:03 Research On Prayer, Sports, & Flow
35:15 Are Emotions Romanticized Words For Flow?
45:29 Peak Performance Is A Game
53:12 Suffering Connected To Passion
58:52 The Art Of Impossible
1:02:55 Holding Yourself Accountable To Your Past Self
1:07:57 Work As A Creative Pursuit
1:17:50 What Steven Has Learned About Himself With Flow
1:19:39 Connect With Steven Kotler
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What’s up outworkers. Steven Kotler unpacks the neurobiology of flow and why accessing it consistently is the key to doing hard things well. We dive into the four-stage flow cycle, how frustration can be a sign you're on the right track, and why lasting change begins with what’s hardwired in all of us. He explains how to structure goals for momentum, why passion requires patience, and how consistency—not intensity—is what drives the impossible forward. Steven also opens up about pain, passion, purpose, and why chasing the impossible is less about big leaps and more about mastering repetition, recovery, and staying in the game.
Tim Doyle (00:02.4)
Stephen, welcome to the show.
Steven (00:04.76)
Thanks for having me, it's good to be with you Tim.
Tim Doyle (00:06.986)
You've done some incredible work in writing when it comes to flow state, but where I want to kick off the conversation with flow is on flight. And you wrote the first draft of your first novel, the angel quickest for flight in a bar when you were a bartender. Knowing what you know now about flow, how do you reflect back on that writing process and being a bartender as a whole?
Steven (00:38.606)
So.
That's funny. So I think two things. If you're gonna get into flow, have to be, you don't have to be calm. Actually at the front end of flow state, there's a little bit of a fight response, but you have to be pretty even. So the nervous system has to be well regulated. And the brain, this is gonna tie up. The brain processes money fears, the same way it processes physical pain. And bartending as you're coming up as a writer,
is the greatest job in the world. You make a ton of cash in very tight periods and you have a full social life and you learn how to talk to anybody. So you can interview anybody as a reporter. Amazing. It's amazing skills training. I get to work in bars till two o'clock in the morning and still get up in time to sort of work with magazines and start writing my book. So like just in terms of solving the money stuff and solving.
safety and security, which is really a big deal. Like we've known this about peak performance. We always tell people, people, where do you start is a question. Like what's the first step? What do you start with? And the answer is you want to start with motivation. For most of us, that means curiosity, which is the foundational human motivator, unless you're food insecure or home insecure or something like that. And then you have to solve money first because the fear will actually block everything else. So bar titting was really great for that.
I think writing a bar, I was a bartender. So like I would come to work early and just sit there and you know, right before I went on that kind of stuff. it, I got really good at tuning out the entire world. I could sit in a crowded bar and write and write. so for focus training and it was like, there wasn't really a choice. I went to college at the University of Wisconsin. Home was like three miles away. Winter was like 80 below. I didn't have a car.
Steven (02:37.25)
You'd have to walk. You didn't do that. it just like you went, you came in town, you stayed in town, you went home and when it was all said and done and you tried to get a ride. like, I wasn't really much of a choice. And, but it, I think it was great focus training. So flow follows focus and by training myself to have task specific focus and block out a bar, I was really good at that. Where that has come in handy later on, and this is, this is the last bit is if you have that skill.
Novelty is a great flow trigger. It produces dopamine, which drives focus, which drives flow. One of the easiest ways when we work with anybody, executives, it doesn't matter, who want more flow in their life, how much novelty you getting? And you can get it in really light ways, going to a cafe, just that you've not been to before, right? That's enough to start doing it. And it's got a lot of positive downstream stuff, but not...
if you're really distractible and you can't lock out focus, you need a little bit of novelty. But so to give you one final example to sort of make it really practical for myself, obviously have to, well, obviously, I don't know, but I read a lot of neuroscience textbooks. I actually really like reading textbooks and it's part of the job as far as I'm concerned. So once every three months or whatever, I tend to go someplace new.
And with this expression of just like, sitting in a hotel room with a balcony looking at mountains I've never seen before, that bit of novelty enough to start the dopamine flowing and it helps a lot, right? You don't have to read neuroscience textbooks when you're not in flow. But when you read them in flow, they're exciting. Ideas are popping and you want things leading to the next and then the texts actually start reading like normal books. And that's really exciting. So.
That was a long answer to a really simple question, but it's actually a really good question. I got a tremendous amount out of bartending, actually.
Tim Doyle (04:37.684)
Yeah, I love it. And that's what I found so fascinating because it wasn't that you just started within this scientific flow approach, but it was like, okay, like he had a real job. And I was like, okay, when I was reading your book and I found out about you being a bartender, I kind of like visualize, I was like, wow, like I feel like bartending could actually be incredible for flow state. And I know
Steven (05:01.63)
as a, and bartending itself is the flowiest damn thing in the world. it's so flowy. And especially when you're young and you get to flirt along the way, right? I mean, like you're young, you get to flirt, which is a tremendous amount of dope. I you can't bartend and not be in the zone, right? Like I worked at really, some of the bars I worked at were really crowded, really crazy. And you know, like,
Tim Doyle (05:06.078)
Yeah.
Tim Doyle (05:13.91)
Yep, yep, yep.
Steven (05:28.79)
You'd see like, you'd have a beverage, it would be over, and like, you'd remember like, the first three customers walked in, and maybe like, somebody broke up a fight in the middle of the night, and you know, and suddenly it's the end of night, and you're like, what happened? How did we get here? What, like, who are these people? What are you doing in my living room?
Tim Doyle (05:47.988)
Yeah, and I mean, I think that's the realization that I had about myself when it comes to podcasting where I'm like, wow, this is so good for flow state and that's
Steven (05:55.534)
Oh, it's the same. Yeah. Any, any time I, if you get to, the other thing is it's fun just talking to strangers and learning about them, right? As a, as a writer, as a storyteller, and later as somebody who was training other people in peak performance, it's just really great that I like, you know, I know, I know people from every strata. I've worked in biker bars. I've worked in steel mill bars. I've worked in intellectual bars where everybody barred dining with me had PhDs. I've worked like I've, it's a
great education in humanity, which is a great thing if you're trying to help people perform better or sell them things. In both cases, like learning about your market, learning about your customer, you know what I mean? On both sides of that, it helped me as a businessman, it helped me as a flow guy, I don't know.
Tim Doyle (06:42.378)
Are flow state and peak performance interchangeable words or what's the difference?
Steven (06:47.242)
No, it's a great question and thank you for starting there. So I define peak performance loosely as simply as getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. that biology, if we push aside physical skills, that biology actually stratifies into five, there's really four skills, cognitive skills. We have a whole suite of motivation skills. We've got a whole suite of learning skills. We've got a suite of creative.
creative and innovative skills, creative problem-solving skills, and we've got us in the wind flow skills and flows, how we turbo boost everything else. It is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best, optimal.
is that there is a, so Chick Set Me High came out of the humanistic movement in psychology, he's technically a personality psychologist, but he's in that tradition of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers and that whole group.
As psychologists, they were trying to differentiate peak performance, which seemed to apply to athletes or soldiers from the full suite of cognitive performance. But this is really just like, honest to God, it's like an anti-jock bias. It's psychologists, not, this is back in the day when there was a real divide between like the nerds and the jocks. It's gone away now, but I grew up in
And it was a real significant, like I got, I got in fights with jocks all the time because they did not like me, right? That's changed now, but like that was my childhood for sure. And you forget things like that. So the psychologist didn't like the jocks, you know, so like people form was not a term they were ever going to use. Cause that was for jocks and soldiers. They were going to say optimal performance, which talked about the whole human and the emotions and the.
Steven (08:42.904)
Well, I mean, there is no such thing as peak performance without the whole human emotions and, you know, all the softer skills and everything else. There's no divide doesn't exist. It's like the mind body divide. There were all these things that people came up with in the 20th century to try to a psychologist to try to put things into categories before we actually enter into the neurobiology. And the categories are really like loose and slippery. And like I could go on about this. Our people have written books about how the terms of psychology came up with.
our frames for things that we're seeing in the world that try to actually describe brain function that happens in here. And it's not quite right. And it gets into a lot of trouble when you want to start doing things like helping people or training, like the work we do at the Flir Research Collector, where we use neurobiology to teach people how to do stuff. Then those things really, those things really, it's a funny thing about jocks and nerds, but it actually plays out in a weird way in the end.
Tim Doyle (09:41.192)
A phrase that I've heard you use a lot and you use it there earlier as well as how we need to get biology to work for us rather than against us. Is biology naturally set up to run against us?
Steven (09:54.99)
No, I actually think it's naturally set up to drive us towards flow. I think we will naturally proceed towards peak performance. And let me give you my evidence. One of the things I noticed as I started training people, and this is globally, right? The Flow Research Collective, 168 countries, I think 28 industries, that are really good map, 50 % male, 50 % female, on our customer base. it's a pretty good, accurate global map of what works and what doesn't. And...
You don't, one, you don't see many differences sort of wherever you go. It's the same triggers work the same way, the same systems work the same way. And that's the advantage of biology, of course, right? It's universally considered. That was also the suspicion when we started The Collective and we started this work, it was, they had tried training Flo back in the nineties using psychology. sent me high, the Godfather Flo psychology.
brilliant, wonderful woman named Susan Jackson, who's a sports psychologist from Australia. They wrote a book about it Flow in Sports, and their success rate was terrible. We at the Flow Research Collective measure everything. We use the exact same flow scale to measure that they used, and we see a reliable, repeatable 70, 80 % increase in flow, which is what happens when you train from the neurobiology because it's mechanism, because it's shared between people. Did that answer your question? Did I sidestep it?
Tim Doyle (11:24.0)
Yeah, no, yeah. And to emphasize the point of scaling, I know that's really central to your work in terms of personality doesn't scale, biology scales. Why is that so critical to your work and how do you go about drawing that line between the two?
Steven (11:44.366)
Great question, tricky answer. Let me start with a slight story about how I learned this, because I learned this the hard way. I think I did what most people do when they start to coach people to become an expert in anything is they start to tell their friends how to live. And I had written a couple of books at this point. And so I had some authority here. People thought I actually knew what I was talking about. And I did from a neurobiological standpoint, from a coaching standpoint.
I was trying to teach people what worked for me. My risk tolerance is wildly out of whack with a lot of people's. I'm on a bunch of different spectrums. I'm a weirdo. I had a strange childhood. I had a strange adulthood. I went out of my way to have those things. What works for me was a disaster. know, the people's lives. mean, a disaster. I put one friend in the hospital. I nearly broke up a couple of marriage. They're still married today. It's 20 years later, 30 years later. I mean, like, it was a fucking disaster.
And I was like, what is going wrong? This is horrible. So immediately I shut up and I literally didn't train another person for 15 years until we really actually figured out what the hell we knew what I was doing. it was my first look at, oh wow, personality doesn't scale. Risk tolerance is very individual. Indiversion to extroversion, very individual.
a bunch of things like that, really affect how I train you, help you, work with you. They're shaped by genetics and environment and that's personality and it's very individual. And if I try to train you to fit my stuff, it's literally the rule as far as I can tell is what you said. Like the surest way to fail is if it works for me, it's gonna not work for you. And I see this all the time, I see coaches.
so often figure out something that works for them and they try to teach it to other people. like, sure, if you have an accolades, a carbon copy of you, it may work, it's only gonna work for a while. Like three years, five years, and it's gonna break. It's gonna shatter and you're gonna have some big break where they leave the master, right? That's guaranteed. And for everybody else, it's really not gonna work. And it was so frustrating to me and I started to think.
Steven (14:04.984)
Wow, it's more than frustrating, it's dangerous. I put somebody in the hospital, I've almost broke up a marriage, I saw other people. I've met coaches, lovely people, really big hearted people trying to really help their class. I met one guy, was out for a, who was like punching people in the face in a boxing ring, because he thought it was gonna teach them grit. And I was like, you're what? And the reason I laugh, I mean, that sounds funny, but I was a competitor to Marshall Arbis as a kid. I took one bad kick to the face.
Everything here up is plastic because everything had to get rebuilt because my nose went through my eye socket and I had 10 years of chronic sinus infections afterwards because they rebuilt it wrong and they had to redo the surgery. was one of the most painful surgeries I've ever gone through and that was one kick gone wrong. Like that's what happens when a punch goes wrong. And this dude was punching people in the face because he thought it was a good way to train. Grinning was like, do you know what happens when that goes wrong?
Like I can tell you, because it went wrong in my life. And I had a headache for 10 years and two of the worst surgery, and I had a lot of surgery and they were the worst surgeries I've been through. The most pain, the worst like wall of pain to wake up into ever. Terrible surgeries. And so I've seen really dumb things done in the name of personality. And I made some of those mistakes and I see a lot of people making those mistakes. it, one it, it,
I mean, I think it's, you know, for all the other solutions, it's dangerous, but I also think it gives the profession, I mean, applied neuroscience, sort of like, it's not like it's applied neurosciences. Like we're doing a very specific thing here. It's not this giant free for all. And I see a lot of examples of the giant free for all and people throwing around neuroscience terms as if they meant anything. And I'm like, I like be careful. Like I try to be careful.
And I still make mistakes right and left, like, just be careful, please.
Tim Doyle (16:04.32)
I know there's a lot of people that are interested in flow state and what I love about your work so much is it's a very methodical way of going about it where it breaks it down point by point and it can be kind of overwhelming at times from the consumer perspective. Can you walk me through the four stage cycle of flow?
Steven (16:25.358)
Yeah, pretty easily. So we used to believe back in the 20th century that flow is a binary. In the zone, you're out of the zone, works like a light switch. And it turns out that it's not the case. Like a great many things in the body, it's a cycle. It's a four stage process. Not all the stages feel flow. In fact, some of them feel awful. Flow is an unconscious process. It's essentially you learn a whole bunch of skills and when your brain can put all those skills together,
and execute them effortlessly, perfectly, that's what flow is. But at the front end of any flow state, you have to learn those skills. So there's always a struggle phase. That's where it starts. That's where the cycle starts. This is onboarding. You're learning the skills. And sometimes this is like something really obvious. Like you remember, if you ever learned how to swing a baseball bat.
There's like 11 different things you gotta keep your eye on the ball, step through the pitch, swing through, all the, your hips, all the step into the, right? On and on and on. If your experience was anything like mine, I learned them like two at a time, three at a time. It took a little while, I had to get strong enough to hold the bat, all that stuff. It takes a little while for it to come together. Or that's a great example of struggle over, stretched out over longer period of time. Or it just be like me, it's where I'm working on my section of whatever book I'm writing.
you know, I'm struggling to get the sentences to work. They're not quite clicking yet. I'm fighting with them. And it turns out what's cool about struggle, what's interesting, most people, it's frustrating. It's frustrated by design. I can go into a lot of neurobiology why you're frustrated and struggle, but like you're frustrated, it sucks. But that frustration is actually a sign you're moving in the right direction, which is a really cool thing to know. And researched by a marvelous woman named Colleen Seifert, who's at the University of Michigan.
discovered that the more frustrated you get, the more you sort of learn about the problem and just get frustrated with it, the better chance you're gonna solve it, get into flow, have a big intuitive breakthrough. So that frustration is actually a sign you're moving in the right direction. The next thing you gotta do is, because what you have to do is you gotta pass the problem from your conscious mind over to your subconscious. Way more powerful, way more powerful. To do that, you gotta take your mind off the problem. Second stage is known as release. You're literally distracting yourself.
Steven (18:42.222)
Low grade physical exercise is what works best. A long walk in nature, not even a long walk, 20 minute walk in nature. I love, I draw. So I'll do 10 minute micro dosing of creativity as a release activity. Little breath work, right? Round a whim, half breathing. Take your pick, but all that, like just take your mind off the problem. And actually it's funny, a friend of mine, Lee Sloedoff, did a study of this with some folks at Brown, I wanna say, and they found that
the best release activity they could find was building model airplanes, by the way, like crazy. this is also why insights happen in the shower. You work all day hard on a problem. You come home, you wanna wash off your day, and the shower is just enough distraction, a little serotonin, et cetera, et cetera, that it kicks you into a release phase. This is the same cycle. This is the incubation period, and the creativity cycle is the same thing. Next phase is foe.
Tim Doyle (19:23.798)
Mmm.
Steven (19:40.748)
Right? Now your subconscious is a shoot on it. Something, the insight pops into your head. Boom, you're in flow, right? That's the third stage of the cycle. And flow is a big, biologically big reaction. takes a little bit of energy to produce a bunch of neurochemicals get released. have limited supply. So on the backend of flow state, what goes on must come down. There's a recovery period, refractory period. And, you have to respect it. It's why.
people who are really good at flow work, seven, eight hours of sleep a night, they have active recovery protocols, sauna, Epsom salt baths, the story of yoga, breath work, that sort of stuff, also at the end of the day. So you can shut it all down and recover, and because you're gonna wake up and struggle again, you wanna start over. And it seems like, so there's one other thing I should tell you, is, flow is a spectrum of experience. It's not one experience.
Um, it's like anger, right? You're a little irked or homicide and murderless. It's the same spectrum. Flow is micro flow, little bit of flow. This is, you're focused on the task at hand. You're writing up. This is when you sit down at work and you got to write an S, uh, an email to a colleague and get sucked into your email. You thought you were going to write like a paragraph and you ended up writing an essay and like an hour goes by and you didn't notice. Right. So that's a lot of classic flow, complete concentration, merger of action awareness, time, just dial distorted. didn't notice it was passing.
You said to self, self disappears in flow. Maybe in micro flow self doesn't disappear, but what happens to all of us all the time is wake back up. You're like, Oh my God, I wrote an essay and I got a P right. has bodily awareness goes away. This happens to all of us all the time. That's micro flow. We're in micro flow. Five, 10 % of our work life. don't even notice it happens all the time, but you can get a really solid, like one or two of those a day for sure. Macro flows, the other end of the spectrum. It's when all those things.
Tim Doyle (21:17.238)
Yep.
Steven (21:34.988)
are turned up to 11. So not only does our sense of self completely vanish, but we start to become one with everything and we merge with consciousness. So we know the biology behind it, but that's like macro flow and in macro flow, this is where like action awareness, but like the surfer becomes one with the wave or the writer becomes one with the words or it's that sort of experience and joyous and ecstatic like all floats are, but really mamable on the macro flow experience.
We have micro flow all the time. have macro slightly more rarely, though much more common, the performing arts, anybody who gives speeches, anybody who plays in a band, anybody who does theater, improv, macro flow, hotbeds, spoken word, hip hop, and same thing with action sports and some regular sports. And it's really depends on your level of expertise in the sport itself. But.
You know, basketball, for example, it's a game of flow. I've written articles about this. I do a lot of work with people in the NBA. Like you win basketball by getting your team into flow and knocking the other team out of flow. And it's a game of runs, right? And that's in flow, out of flow, in flow. And it's literally, you know, the team that can get into flow in the last quarter wins. That's like, that's what they're playing. That's the game, right? want to, I basketball is great athletic skill, but the mental game is.
Tim Doyle (22:43.094)
Mmm.
Steven (23:00.428)
Are you in flow? Can you knock the other team out of flow? And you know, in certain offenses are better at flow than others, right? There's nothing particularly flowy about like, remember when the Lakers used to have Shaq and they would play that plotting half court offense that like you could literally like take reward piece in between baskets. It was just so slow, right? Not, that was flowy for Shaq.
Tim Doyle (23:14.975)
Yeah.
Tim Doyle (23:21.238)
Ha
Steven (23:25.43)
Nobody else. And when it wasn't flowing for Kobe, he let you know, right? He got pissed and let everybody know versus like, know, Dan Antonio's like that crazy, like let's score in the first 11 seconds. Very flowy offense. The triangle, the old Chicago Bulls offense when they knew what they were doing, very flowy. Okay, I can talk basketball for a long time. We'll stop.
Tim Doyle (23:30.038)
Yeah.
Tim Doyle (23:49.024)
Phil Jackson's gotta be the king of flow when it comes to basketball.
Steven (23:51.918)
I have friends who are friends with him and I've been trying so hard to get in a room with Phil and they're like, well, what are you gonna bring to the table? And I was like, I could bring some flow stuff. They're like, Phil doesn't care, he's retired. He's done coaching. And I was like, shit, I don't know what I could offer Phil. I'm dying to get in room. Lovely game. I've gotten to know George Karl and his son, Kobe Karl, very well. So I've gotten to pick some amazing NBA minds about coaching too, which is really, it's really cool.
Tim Doyle (24:04.854)
Love of the game though, love of the game and passionate guy.
Tim Doyle (24:21.354)
Interesting. I'm really interested about the relationship between flow and physical pain. I do a lot of work with people when it comes to chronic back pain and the mind body connection is a central part of the work that I do with people. So when they're, somebody doesn't feel physical pain or exhaustion, is that because there's some type of other physical change or is that more so just the shift in our mental perception?
of those sensations.
Steven (24:51.382)
No, it's a, so let me first say I broke my back four years ago. exploded my L four and L five facet. mean like spider webbed it. I'm one of the first people in history to use stem cells to fix broken back. by the way, so it's not it's back. My back is back. but, I had, I've broken everything. I lived with chronic back pain for about three years.
somewhere between like a five and a six, sometimes up to a seven on the pain scale. It was the hardest thing I've ever dealt with. So I'm just saying this because my sympathy goes out, heart goes out to those people. live with that, that it is really hard. And you talk about a flow blocker, wow, is it hard to push past that? The answer to your question is there are a bunch of neurochemicals that underpin flow. Among them are anandamide and endorphins. So anandamide is...
the exact same psychoactive that is found in marijuana. It's an endocannabinoid. We have an internal endocannabinoid system, right? It's the second immune system essentially. And it runs on an anamide. When you smoke pot, take it edible, whatever, it's pushing up an anamide. Why do you smoke pot to provide cancer relief, pain relief? Because it deadens pain. So that's part of it. The other part is endorphins are internal opiates. Endorphins mean opiates internal, right?
the most common, there are 20 endorphins, the most common is a hundred times more protein than medical morphine. So when you're in flow, you're the most really like high level anandamide. And I don't know the, I don't know what that did. Like I've never heard somebody say, it does, it it drops. I find that an anandamide can use like getting stoned. I've broken a lot of bones, I've healed a lot of stuff. don't like opiates. So I'll use marijuana way more. And I find if my pain is at a six, it will take it to a four.
but it's a dull four that I could ignore, right? It usually gets to the point that I could ignore it. So that's, I don't know how you compare that, but that's why Flow works. In fact, funny story, I've got a new knee, I've got a brand new ACL, and I was skiing the other day, and I'm just now at the point in the recovery, I'm nine, 10 months in, but a month ahead of schedule in my training, and I can start to ski like me. I can go faster, I can go off piste, I can cut, and I...
Steven (27:18.84)
fucking took a really sharp turn around a tree and my knee hurt and I was really worried because I was deep in flow. And I was like, crap, when this like, can't, it hurt a little and I was like, I was with the guy that was like, I can't tell if I just hurt myself or not, because this feels great. I'm having a blast my life, but I gotta go shut it down now. And I like, I was fine. I actually didn't hurt the knee, but I was like, I couldn't tell and I've learned sometimes like with like,
Tim Doyle (27:37.589)
Yep.
Steven (27:48.056)
With certain times, like my back pain for example, now, I've got low grade chronic back pain that's gonna come back when I ski. It's not sharp enough to get me off the hill and I can usually flow through it until the end of the day but when the flow goes away, I'm like, yeah, you broke your back. I could tell, like, there it is.
Tim Doyle (28:09.76)
Are you familiar with the work of Dr. John Sarno at all when it comes to mind body work and chronic back pain or no?
Steven (28:17.108)
Mm-mm. No. That name sounds a little familiar though.
Tim Doyle (28:21.6)
So he's had a profound, he's dead now, but his work had a profound impact on my life. So similar to you, I had two massive disc herniations in my lumbar spine, L4, L5 and L5S1. All different types of physical treatments didn't help me. know, physical therapy shots was very, very close to getting surgery. And then I found out about Dr. John Sarno and his work on the mind body connection and how, you know,
Steven (28:51.022)
I'm making a note. What do I read?
Tim Doyle (28:52.618)
how chronic back pain can the mind body prescription by him and also healing back pain by Dr. John Sarnoff.
Steven (29:04.078)
One thing I have to say, because you've brought it up two or three times, and it's just worth, so are you familiar with Ellen Langer at Harvard? Ellen's my favorite. Ellen's lovely. I love her. She's amazing. She's a huge hero of mine, we've had her on our podcast. We tried to do some research, too. We haven't done it yet, but she's just amazing. her work, if anybody has literally like,
Tim Doyle (29:12.372)
Yep, yeah, Another person that I wanna get on the show.
Steven (29:33.114)
You're too, you're young enough that you don't remember this, but when I came into this field in the early 1990s, the mind body connection, like there was no mind body connection. Don't talk about the mind body connection. Don't talk about consciousness. Don't talk about emotions. These are not real topics for science. Like you would get laughed out of the fricking room and a bunch of, took flow, know, Rick Doblin took psychedelics. Richie Davidson took meditation. Andy Newberg.
took mystical experiences and Alan Langer took the mind body connection. We slowly took freaking all, didn't know, a whole bunch of other people, right? And it took like 20, 30, 40 people working like step-by-step for 30 years to like disavow us of like the errors of the 20th century. It took a lot of work. A lot of people worked really hard on that.
Tim Doyle (30:25.14)
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the main goals with my podcast is to have a lot of conversations within this space like that. I've also had Andy Newberg on the show a couple of months back. He's done incredible work. Love, love his book.
Steven (30:36.152)
Memento.
Steven (30:41.292)
I own my career. mean, like he took me under by, he took me under his wing. That's the reason I have a career. We're actually funny. So funny story we're doing. It's now 30 years later after, you know, he took me under his wing and I became, you know, I learned neuroscience from Andy. We're doing, we finally got back together to do more research and we're doing really funny, interesting work on faith and sports and flow and winning. We asked Andy's a hockey player and he wanted to know.
And I do want to know, he's like, see all these athletes praying and I want to know, do they win more? Do people who have faith win more? Does it correlate? So we actually did it, we've done a study. We did a study, we've got data where it's coming out probably in about a month and a half.
Tim Doyle (31:17.116)
I... This is...
Tim Doyle (31:27.574)
This is like a divine moment for me right now and I have to forward you this email. I didn't get a response back from him, unfortunately, after we recorded together, but I sent him an email asking that exact same question because I was like, you always see these athletes in post-game interviews or whatever, know, very faithful. Like I just need to thank God first. I'm like, where is the research on this?
Steven (31:50.988)
Let me, I'm gonna blow your mind. I, yeah, yeah. Okay, so there's no research. We did the very first study and this is not exact. So I'm going to overstate the data to make it clear. but there's no correlation between faith and winning. We couldn't find one, but there turns out that prayer is a float trigger. So praying pre-game will drive you into flow.
which does correlate with winning. So faith doesn't actually correlate with winning, but prayer works as a flow trigger and a pregame ritual and it produces more flow, makes you more flow prone. And as a result, you win more. So that's what we discovered. It's fascinating. I was so excited when we actually like, when edit, was the AI found the prayer thing. Like I wasn't even looking at it in the data. Like it popped out and I was like, you.
Tim Doyle (32:37.728)
So fascinating.
Steven (32:50.37)
Of course, like it was so obvious. I saw it, I was like, why didn't I think of that? That's really obvious. Like that makes a great deal of sense, but it's also, I start laugh, I laugh about it because of Andy and I were just talking about this back in the nineties, because there was such prejudice against so much of this work. The first thing we had to prove collectively, like everybody wanted to do this work on consciousness and altered states and performance and all this stuff. The first thing we had to actually prove.
was religion was good for you. Because there was such a hostility towards anything spiritual. So back in the 90s, there was early studies and they were done at Duke that it turns out going to church, going to temple, you live longer, right? We now know it's a language approach, social, right? We know why now, we understand all the mechanism, but in the beginning they were like, we had to actually prove it, right? That going to church, having religious belief, being spiritual had
Tim Doyle (33:24.68)
Mm.
Steven (33:49.87)
Once we could prove that it had health and longevity impact, suddenly, oh, it's science. That was the wedge issue. It's the strangest thing now, because nobody even talks about that work anymore. It's sort of laughable to think otherwise in a sense. But people forget that at the time atheism was really in the bow. had people like Christopher Hitchens and a bunch of others talking about how belief in God was mental illness or having spiritual.
Tim Doyle (33:58.57)
Yep.
Steven (34:19.842)
beliefs were a form of inset, right? Like they were trying to make that argument and they were really having an argument with the Christian right. And it was really over stem cells, right? That was like Reagan decided that he wanted to politicize the Christian right for the first time. And then there was arguments over stem cells. And it was a really weird quagmire that nobody remembers now, but it hugely shaped all the work that we're all doing now. That's a tangent, sorry.
Tim Doyle (34:48.438)
All good. You've said that lucky or luck really just means frequent access to flow. When it comes like to things like happiness, joy, meaning and purpose are all these emotions that can feel intangible and harder to find. Are they really just romanticized words for flow as well?
Steven (35:12.02)
That's kind of an awesome question. So.
Steven (35:24.938)
Meaning is a distinct system in the brain from flow, but when flow shows up at the same time as meaning, we tend to really believe those things. So for example, I have had done work with a lot of three letter agencies and, know, points in the military. What happens in a terrorist training camp? First, they do standard brainwashing techniques to loosen up your, keep people up late, don't give them food, tilt their consciousness.
and then be very nice to them and put them into flow and teach them new things and they will adopt the new beliefs. And that's how you create a zealot. Like it's a known, like that's what you do. And by the way, that formula is not new. If you read 1984, that's based on actual brainwashing techniques to use in, I want to say World War I that Orwell was writing about. So this is not new news, right? This is very old news, but it's not particularly well incorporated into how
When I work with the military, always explain to them, you're dealing with an addiction. You think you're dealing with something that's being caused by social or class or politics. You're dealing with a physical addiction and you have to treat it like an addiction. we've had those conversations. So meaning is separate from flow, purpose is separate from flow, but woven in very much.
Steven (36:55.37)
And some of it gets really weird. So I'll give you an example. Autonomy, which is the drive to steer our own ship. You wouldn't think that has anything to with flow, but it turns out autonomy and focus are coupled systems in the brain. So you can't pay maximum attention to something if you're not the one, you're not doing it by choice. So you can't actually get into flow without like sort of free will and that kind of direction and things like that. And so some of those systems, they're
They're not the same thing. They are neurologically distinct, but they are super related. You can't have one without the other. And some of them are now the same thing. So happiness is now there are three tiers of happiness. The first one is how do you feel right here, right now? That's not a flow based thing at all. It's based on a bunch of other stuff. The flow can impact how happy you feel. But the next two definitions, the next level up is enjoyment. Second best we get to feel on the planet is enjoyment.
It's defined as a high flow activity where the thing that's driving us into flow is aligned with our goals. The best we get to feel on the planet is purpose. And that's when the thing that we're trying to do drives us into flow helps people greater than ourselves. There's all kinds of evolutionary reasons for this. Like it's really good for the species and we can go into that if you want, but they're very intertwined and they're very intertwined systems.
Steven (38:25.102)
Purpose is a thing where flow is a state of consciousness. Flow will underpin, purpose will strengthen, it will drive it forward. You can't really have purpose without a lot of flow. mean, you can, but it doesn't work so well. But it's a great question. it's funny because when I first came in and started doing this work, I was asking a similar question, but at a different scale. I was like,
Tim Doyle (38:31.062)
Mm.
Steven (38:53.13)
is our mystical experiences flow states? Like when somebody gets into a trance state while meditating, are we talking about flick? We didn't know. Now we know, they're slightly different and related, but we know how they're different and we know how they're related. We have not understood the neurobiology. But in the beginning, that was the biggest hurdle to this work was people thought flow were mystical experiences and nobody wanted to talk about mystical experiences out loud because you sounded flaky, right? There was an anti-religion bias, especially in the eighties and the nineties.
Tim Doyle (39:19.636)
Yep.
Steven (39:22.728)
And so that was one of the big hurdles coming in.
Tim Doyle (39:28.31)
Yeah, I find that really interesting. And when I was reading some of your books and going over your work, I think that's the thing that helped me the most where it just, it really concretized things and made it feel tangible rather than thinking about these things like happiness, joy, where it's like, okay, like, what does that truly mean? Where it's like, okay, like let's stick to...
Steven (39:47.086)
Well, that's what you got, you got it first. That's what drove me into the neuroscience in the first place. So what the fuck are all these cyclops synonyms? I would, was a little kid. I had a problem with synonyms. Like I didn't understand. There were a lot of names for body parts and I didn't understand that a lot of those names were the same thing. I was like, I did women have like seven things down there. Cause I, there's so many terms. I'm very confused.
Tim Doyle (39:53.77)
Yep.
Steven (40:15.278)
And I sort of felt the same way when I started to learn psychology in college and I started trying to figure this stuff out. I was like, what do all these fucking terms mean? They're so squishy. In fact, I just had last week, Scott Barry Coppin was on our podcast and he's a psychologist and a great friend of mine. And we had our forever argument, which is I don't like psychology because it's squishy. And he doesn't like neurobiology because he doesn't think it gets you far enough into, you
whatever, and we actually had the same argument, but I'm on your side. Like I look at all the terms of psychology and I'm like, the best thing that these are anchored in is somebody came up with a model and a model doesn't get me very far. It's still like, it's a finger pointing at the moon. It's not the moon and they're reductive. if you're trying to, find that models again, and with this is why psychologists bug me and they get into trouble. Coaches figure out what works for them.
and train other people. Psychologists find a model that aligns with their personality and they train people from that model. when, not all psychologists, but I've seen that happen as well. it always, that was the stuff that made me crazy. Not, cause I thought I was, I was like, it's not useful. can't, maybe this is useful for some people, right? So obviously I was discovering a carpet, incredibly useful for him. He can train himself and steer himself from the psychology. There's probably a ton of people who are like that. I'm like you.
Tim Doyle (41:22.494)
Interesting.
Steven (41:42.414)
I was baffled. I was like, I'm not smart enough or I can't figure this out. like, you know, one of the things that I think is really fun about having a Vipassana meditation practice is you start getting a really clear sense of exactly what do we mean by joy? What do we, like those are actually like, those are real things in the body. They have geometry, they have shape, they have tingling sensations and like there's actually physicality to them. And when you actually get good at the sort of the interior receptive,
that comes along with a positive meditation, you're like, shit, I can start to answer some of these questions. But especially at beginning of my journey, I was baffled. I was like you, was like, don't know what you're fricking talking about. me something. How does it work? Tell me how it works.
Tim Doyle (42:28.118)
I think I like the psychological side of things as well, but I know for me that it needs to be balanced with the data and the science behind it. And I think that's something that like just recently I kind of made that realization about myself and what has really helped me. I like how you use.
Steven (42:46.432)
I will tell you by the way that one of the signs of like...
the development of expertise, more mature intellects. I always say that like,
If you, smarter people start to realize that you have to know, like it's not, you're going to learn the psychology. got the biology of the neuroscience, you learn the psychology and then you're like, Oh fuck, I need the embodied cognition. Oh, I need the history of mine. And I always say, people ask me like, what do you think your job really is? And I said, I think my job is to translate between languages. And what I mean by that is the neurochemistry folks don't.
speak the same language as the computational neuroscientists who don't can't talk to the cognitive psychologists, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, the embodied cognitive people. And I think because I started out as a journalist, I had this wide view. That was what I saw. I was like, oh, wow, if we could get all these people talking to one another, we're going to get somewhere. Because what I started to notice in, especially when I was interviewing top scientists, I was like, it's not that they've the really good ones. They don't just know.
vertical, they don't have a vertical, they're not just depth, they're width. They can tell me how this idea relates to this idea in this field and this field and it goes out a little bit. And I was like, oh, there's something here. I'm going to try to learn to do that and think that way. I have found, and I always get confident around people, like I'm comfortable around people who do what you just did where you're like, yeah, I need the psychology, I also need the neuroscience and I probably need, and I'm like, okay, yeah, you're doing your homework.
Steven (44:26.334)
you're thinking about these things the right way. In my opinion, I could be wrong. I've just seen it so often in like the smart people who I'm like, wow, I really admire the way you think, not just like your ideas, but how they like what you could do with them in the world. That seems to be a commonality. also noticed that like everybody sooner or later, you have to add evolutionary biology to your thinking. If you can't think about things in terms of evolution,
That's a real, that's a weakness actually in the game, in your game. That's one of the things I always tell you, if you want to get smart, like learn the psychology, learn the neuroscience, learn the evolution too. Take the time to learn a little bit about evolution of biology and psychology, because you can't, you can't think about these things properly, I think, without it. But I could be a snob, I don't know, at this point.
Tim Doyle (45:15.958)
Speaking of games, I like the framework you use of seeing peak performance as a game with whatever work and passions that we undertake. Why is that framing of playing a game rather than trying to accomplish a goal so helpful?
Steven (45:29.87)
Hmm.
a couple of things there. So, P Performance is an infinite game, is how I talk about it, because you can't win. You can definitely lose though. It's an interesting inference game, an infinite game, because you can definitely lose, but you cannot win. It's an endless game. let me put it, let me put it you, my best friend plays guitar, he has a statement I love, which is, he's like, I love the guitar, because I will never run out of guitar. There's an endless amount of things to, right, it's an endless.
Tim Doyle (45:40.555)
Yep.
Steven (46:00.576)
I love drawing, I love writing, I love flow science, like, cause I'll never, they're never gonna run out. They're endless. I'm never gonna, I will take, Steven, what's your goal? I want to be the best writer in the history of the universe. Is that a thing? No, I'm really happy it's not a thing, which is the other reason I like it as an infinite game. So not everybody is wired this way, but I see this a lot in the flow research collective and it always makes me wince. And I never, I don't exactly tell people not to.
do it, but I always go, God, I don't know if I would do this. When people start setting goals, because humans function better with best with three tiers of goals, clear goals, a daily to do list, so you know what you focus on, high-hard goals, which are your three to five year action plans and the mission level goals, right? And they should all funnel towards one another. What you do today should feed your high-hard goals, should feed your mission. And that's when we're most motivated. And I see a lot of people, especially around high-hard goals,
set money goals. I want to make a million dollars this year. And money goals, those kinds of out, I don't like outcome goals. Outcome goals tend to ratchet up stress and they're, they end up being demotivating. So I like process goals. So it's not, I want to make a million dollars this year, but it's, want to advance my book by a thousand pages a day because baby, that's how I make a million dollars.
or whatever it is. I like process goals and outcome goals freak me out. And one of the things about an infinite game is it's a process goal. So if you get that you're applying a process goal and you're not, right? Now there are certain people, this is again, the personality thing, this is why I don't say anything. There are people where outcome goals work for them, right? They're actually a slim minority statistically, but.
And you know, how do you know unless you test it yourself and see what works for you and what fails and certain things like I can set outcome goals in. I can say I'm going to finish this book in October. Cause I've written 14 books. I know exactly how long it's going to take me to finish a book. And I actually know that if I tell you I'm going to finish it in October, I'm probably going to finish it in June. Cause I can like, that's how that shit works.
Steven (48:16.13)
doesn't freak me out at all. Whereas other people who have never written a book before, really want to, you know, I trade people in flow for writers. If they were to say, I got to write a book of the year, it'd be like me saying, I'm going to make a million dollars. You're fucking freak them out. Right. But so, and people like in finance who work with money for a living and have zero fear around money and risk and things like that, they can set money goals without, like it doesn't even, their pulse doesn't even move. Right. Like, so.
Again, personality is very individual there, but that's why I treat, and I think it's true. think performance is an infinite game and I don't think you're ever going to get there. And the other thing that I think is really important about this, and this is sort of worth saying out loud, just cause not enough people say it out loud. And it's like, God, I wish somebody had told me this when I was younger would have saved me a lot of heartache. It doesn't get any easier. You just get better at it. And that's as far as I could tell.
and I'm 57 now, it has never gotten easier. I've gotten almost everything I've set out to do. I've accomplished way more than I thought it was ever going to accomplish. I'm really proud of the work I've done and the people I've gotten to do it with. But it has gotten harder. Every year it's harder. I'm just better at it. I mean, maybe if I...
Tim Doyle (49:35.892)
Hmm.
Steven (49:40.034)
didn't constantly keep rationing up this, because the game is like, you're like, well, okay, I did that, what else can I do? Okay, I did that, what else can I do? That's the game, that's peak performance, that's the infinite game. Maybe if I stop playing that way, it'll get easier, but I don't know anybody who it gets easier for.
Tim Doyle (49:47.147)
Yep.
Tim Doyle (49:56.918)
That's really interesting. And I'm fully aligned with you, I think within my own personal life as well. see it as I'm focused on input-based goals rather than output-based goals. And so the output is kind of just a byproduct of...
Steven (50:08.834)
What, yeah, control what you can control. I'll give you a flip side of one. You probably do this too. I don't do this in anybody I work with. And in fact, in, know, I run a, I'm launching a new high level mastermind for creative leaders known as the Alliance right now. Cause I've been wanting to work with on a really intimate basis with creative leaders for a while. And.
this is one, but I don't have many rules, because you can't tell creators what to do, right? One of the fun things about working with creators is they're real adults, like you can't tell them what to do. You just gotta tell them how it works and get the fuck out of the way. It's totally backwards. Knowledge workers want like, give me 50 steps and a checklist, I have a boss. Like my filter for who gets into this thing or not, it's like I have mirrors and leaders. I'm like, if they got a boss, this is probably not right for them. Like it's a really simple filter, but.
One of the only rules I have is if you're talking about a problem that you're actively not working out to solve, you're talking about politics, you're talking about your neighbors, if you're talking about whatever, you're just gossiping and we don't gossip. Which is the inverse of the same thing, right? Like if you're not actively working on the problem to fix it, you're just gossiping. Gossiping is terrible for the brain, it's bad for you, right? So it's...
Tim Doyle (51:22.399)
Yeah.
Steven (51:32.886)
It's one of the ways you can get rid of a lot of sort of negative thinking and a lot of kind of negativity with that one sort of simple rule. And it holds people really accountable also to what they believe in, which is good, right? It forces you into a position of authenticity. And there's a lot of, you probably know this, there's a lot of peak performance benefits from authenticity. We just, we're designed to be authentic beings. so, and when it comes to infinite games and the peak performance works, this is really cool.
Tim Doyle (51:45.526)
like that.
Steven (52:02.572)
you have the highest flow thing, the tool in your arsenal, you have an authentic play style, right? And it could be used when you're being creative and expressing yourself as a writer or a musician. It could be used as an athlete when you're expressing yourself on the playing field. It could be, you know, expressed as a business leader leading a meeting or in a conversation with your wife or whatever. We have an authentic play style. And it's like, once you can tune into it, it's freaking it. It's instant flow, right?
Tim Doyle (52:09.597)
Mmm, yep.
Tim Doyle (52:31.476)
really cool. So with your book,
Steven (52:33.358)
It's why comedians are miserable people as a general rule, except when they're on stage, but they have an authentic play style on stage and it's so flowy that it helps them deal with all the heaviest. You want to be in the saddest room you've ever, go to a room with professional comedians and sit with them. It's the harshest room you'll ever be in. You'll never be in a room that hard ever again.
Tim Doyle (52:59.35)
Well, I think that's a great segue to talking about passion actually, because you've talked about this a lot. within our society, we definitely have a romanticized perception of what passion is and what it feels like. And I actually recently just learned that the Latin root for passion comes from the word passio, which means to suffer. Why is it important to understand?
that component of passion when it comes to our.
Steven (53:33.4)
suffering component?
Tim Doyle (53:34.804)
Yeah, and with passion.
Steven (53:37.784)
So if you are interested in peak performance, you want to start with motivation. if you want to, there's a lot that motivates us, but there are five major human motivators and they're designed by evolutionarily. And for me adult human developments standpoint, they come on in this order. Usually curiosity is the fundamental human motivator. It's designed to be built into passion. Passion is designed to be built into purpose.
Once you have purpose, what does the system want next? It wants autonomy, the freedom to pursue that purpose. Once you have autonomy, what's the next thing you want? Mastery, the ability to pursue it well. Those are the biggest five drivers we have at an intrinsic level. And you get all of them right and get flow, which sort of cements and supercharges everything. And you don't even get a couple of them right, because they all produce dopamine. Curiosity, when you're curious, there's a little bit of dopamine, drives focus, drives you towards flow.
even more dopamine, purpose, dopamine, plus a bunch of other pro-social neurochemicals that also tighten focus, right? That's the game you're playing when it comes to that stuff. And passion's just great. Peter Diamandis, who I've written a bunch of books with, is one of my dear friends and started the Express Foundation. He always likes to say, and he's started 28 companies or some ridiculous number of companies, that like, you know, when it's three o'clock in the morning, but up for four days straight trying to fix your startup, if you don't have passion, you're done.
And that's sorta like, that's, know, it passion is, it keeps us gritty, it keeps us persistent. It's just too hard otherwise. Like it's the same thing. And I always tell people, when you're trying to build curiosity and a passion, don't start with one curiosity. Look for three or four things that you're curious about and find places that they intersect. And by the way, if you don't know how to do that, use ChachiBT, it's phenomenal for finding those kinds of intersections, right?
I'm curious about Mark Twain. I'm curious about Chinese food. How do they connect? Ask ChatGVT, it'll give you that answer. I used to train people to do this and it would take fucking forever. Sometimes, no, I've got a tool for you now. It's called ChatGVT, it's built to do this. But it's fantastic. It's really actually good at that. But I always say if you can get to the intersection of three or four passions and play there for a while, really experiment and learn and just teach yourself if it's sort of, that's got enough energy.
Tim Doyle (55:46.71)
Ha
Steven (56:02.702)
Right three four curiosities that's good enough energy for passion and then you live there for a while and make sure it's really a passion You're not going through a phase then you attach that to a purpose cause greater than yourself How do you use this thing that lifts you up to lift up other people and it sounds really like noble It's not noble at all. You want the pro-social neurochemistry you get from caring about other people from a performance standpoint you want more flow and
more neurochemistry from caring about other people will give you more flow. It's really selfish. Purpose is really selfish. It turns out it's really good for the world, which so like, I'm never going to say don't go for it, but from a performance standpoint, it's a totally selfish move in the game, but it's a good one. So I just think you want all those things pointed in the same direction. the last thing I want to say there, the mistake I see people making the most, and this is so,
We were to come to me and be like, what are the top five peak performance mistakes you see people making? Somewhere on that list is they, people are super impatient to have a passion or a purpose and they want it yesterday. And they, and especially if you're in the, you know, the people who virtue, the virtuous signalers, if you're, if you're virtue signaling, your passion or purpose is going to get you attention or get you laid.
then you've got, you need your passion immediately because it's sexual selection and it's ego and like, you know. It's just, it's absurd because what you end up seeing is people spending immense amounts of time and money on this thing that is literally only a phase or they're doing it for their ego and like two or three years later, they're going to burn out. And if you put a ton of yourself into something and it turns out it was just a phase,
Now, in the end, those phases actually work for you because they come together into something greater. But at the time, it's really demotivating. And for people who aren't really gritty underneath, can sort of you know, can sort of derail them. And I've seen, you know, one of the things you notice as you get older, I was just having this conversation with a couple of friends of mine, is you see the people who get waylaid at different points, like who get taken out and...
Steven (58:22.478)
One of the things that you see taking people out is, man, I leaned into this for fucking five years and it didn't went away. wasn't like, it was too hard. I wasn't into it, whatever. that's a hard one to bounce back from. And life is short. So if you got derailed for five to 10 years, now you're playing from behind and it's a little more complicated, which is not to say you can't get back to where you want to be, but it's a little more complicated.
Tim Doyle (58:49.302)
So with your book, The Art of Impossible, what I find really interesting, the way that I view it, it's like there's a wide divide between the phrase and the action plan behind that where it's like the phrase, the art of impossible, big grand idea, but it seems like very small and repetitive and process driven when it comes to putting in the action. It almost seems like there's a divert or.
it almost seems like there's an inverse relationship there between doing the impossible and the excitement factor from like an outsider's point of view. Obviously like the one who's doing the work, you're going to be excited by it all because that's your purpose or your passion. like from the outside looking in, it's almost like, wow, this is much more monotonous and ordinary than I would have thought. But it's more so like the impossible side of it comes into like
the manner and the fashion you go about that work. What are your thoughts on
Steven (59:49.538)
I think you're exactly correct. If you get to the end of Art Impossible, you see that peak performance is essentially a checklist. It's like seven things you should try to do every day and six more things you should do every week.
Steven (01:00:04.35)
It is, it's, people always want to ask me when I give speeches, my least favorite question, it produces a very bad reaction. What are the three things I should do Monday morning? And my answer is always the same. It's fuck you. There's no three things you can do Monday morning. They're like, are you kidding? It's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday repeat. And it turns out peak performance is a checklist. It's a damn checklist. That's what it is. And the path to impossible is a checklist.
If everything is a checklist, secret to business, this is the thing nobody tells you. I don't care what business it is that you want to start, what you want to do in the fucking world. It's a checklist. Figure out what's the checklist. Execute the checklist. That's how you start a company. What is the checklist needed to start this company? Right? what are like all of it? It's a checklist. Peak performance is a checklist. And
where most people get derailed is they talk about the goal, they get a lot of dopamine, it feels really sexy, and then they start working towards it, and you're like, oh my God, I'm gonna do the same thing over and over. Peter Diamandis and I were joking. Actually, was, it so great. But it was 360, Peter's big event a couple weeks ago. were a bunch of us sitting around who also did the same thing for a living, and we were talking about like code for thought. Another way of saying thought leader is willing to stand on a stage and say the same thing over.
and over and over over again. Like that's really, like I've seen people take it out of this career because they want to say something different every time. I used to, when he had to accept me, I was alive, I used to mess with him and be like, Mike, you got to fucking define flow twice a semester at the start of each class. I have to define it four times a day. Four times a day. Just so you know, you do it twice a year, I do it four times a day and I've done it for 20 years. That's the job.
That like, you want to be a popularizer of ideas, if you want to bring flow to the masses, which is what one of the goals was, that's the job you're signing up for. And it's incredibly repetitive. And the people who succeed are the ones who are geeked. Like you have to do this job, you have to be wired like a comedian. want to, how do you make a micro tune in the speech to make it funnier or communicate better? That's gotta be your.
Tim Doyle (01:01:59.222)
Mm.
Tim Doyle (01:02:22.23)
Mmm.
Steven (01:02:25.454)
That's gotta be your thing. If that's not your thing, this job is not for you. Cause that's really what the job is. Writing is the same thing. Sure, there's a great, it's a creative whatever when I'm laying down the first draft and I'm freestyling. And then I'm really gonna rewrite that same chapter a hundred times before you see it. Are you willing to reread the same thing and make micro tunes a hundred times in a row? That's what gets you to the top of bestseller lists. And if you're not wired that way, don't do the job.
Tim Doyle (01:02:56.788)
You said something to your longtime editor of 25 years that really stuck with them is that when you're writing your to do lists, you're one person, but then you're completely other person when you're acting on it. And you said, I just worked for the boss. The boss is the guy who wrote the list. And I think that outlook is really, really interesting where you don't want to work for the present version of yourself. Or we always get into the mindset of like,
Steven (01:03:21.742)
No, you work for the best version of yourself. You gotta work for the best version of yourself.
Tim Doyle (01:03:25.48)
Yeah, exactly. Or it's like, I've heard you talk about you're working for the past tense version of yourself, because like, that's the person who made the to do list. And I think that's so true, because we've gotten into this mindset. And it's become such like a buzzword of like, like, what would my future self want me to do? But it's like, what did your past tense self like the person like you've already been like, what did that person like say that like, you're supposed to do and like stick to that point?
Steven (01:03:55.246)
To me, it's, I make my to-do list for the next day at the end of my day. I've already won my day. It's done. I'm about to go start my active recovery protocol. I'm to make my to-do list for the next day so I can lower cognitive load and help me recover better and sleep better. But that's the best version of myself. And in the middle of...
the to-do list when I really, when I look at the next thing on the to-do list and it says taxes or something like, you know what I mean? Like I wanna reach for the bottle. Like start drinking that is my reaction to taxes or something like, you know what I mean? Like, no. But you know, I work for the boss. I don't have any choice in the matter. I also like a lot of this was useful to me very much so when I was thinking about as an athlete.
Tim Doyle (01:04:31.798)
Hmm.
Steven (01:04:51.296)
as an action sport athlete. So sometimes, you know, the little thing on the to-do list is something scary and dangerous. I don't really want to do it. But I know when I'm done, I want to be the person who has done it. Like that's what's next. like, it's very useful. I work for the boss. You know what I mean? I came to do a job. I'm going to do the job. And a lot of it, so a lot of it came out of...
back when I was a journalist and we used to talk about it. In fact, my new novel has a journalist in it and I actually put this in there. So in journalism, we talked about the difference between home games and away games. Home games, like you work, the story at home, the environment, everything. And away games are when you go to cover a war or you go to cover whatever. And I always found that on away games, I would do anything to get the story. Like I was literally like crazy.
Crazy, like the amount of times I put my life on the line without even thinking about it to get the story to do the job. And I was like, I'm a really goal-directed person. like, that's how, like I'm wired that way. And I've really worked on getting my goal-directed system like, you know, it works really well for me. And like, keeps me motivated. So I was like, okay. So like, as long as I treat it like an away game. So when I make a to-do list, the next day is an away game.
That's how I think about it. Like I'm on a job, I gotta just like do the job. And I just find it gives me enough, it gives me more emotional distance. One of the things that I find very, very true and very, very hard for people to admit, and I've seen it almost a day. I haven't seen anybody who is excused from it is we lose a days a month to our emotions.
We get just derailed, we get dysregulated, right? And it takes us out one way or another. either half there at work or you know what I mean? So peak performance, some of it is just like getting that time back. It doesn't sound like a lot, right? You lose three days a month to your emotions, okay, great. But there's 12 months a year. You've just given up a month and a half, essentially a month and five, you five weeks to your dysregulate, like.
Steven (01:07:10.624)
And so if I can get control of that system a little bit, that means that I get a month and a half farther than you next year. Right. And while I don't treat it as a competition, of course it's a competition. So you know what I mean? And I'm competing against someone. I don't know exactly who they are, but they're somewhere. They're competing against me. Somebody wants my job and they're coming for me. And I can't afford to give up five weeks if I don't have to for like little stuff that I, that you know what I mean?
There's gonna be enough stuff that's real that's gonna dysregulate me. I don't need to.
Steven (01:07:48.696)
get hung up on the smaller stuff. So I work for the boss. He keeps me out of
Tim Doyle (01:07:52.456)
I love that framing. And I think that's something that I've definitely approved upon within my life where it's like, I've consciously been aware of like, okay, I'm shortening the gaps here between like getting derailed by certain things like that and getting deeper into, I guess, your identity when it comes to your work. Even though your focus is on science and research, at your core, you're an artist and hearing you talk,
and the passion and the energy with which you talk, it sounds like an artist. How do you think all people could benefit from seeing their work, no matter what that work is, as a creative pursuit?
Steven (01:08:39.118)
So this is funny question to me because to me, creativity is the invisible skill. It's the killer skill. So when we're done with this call and are anybody listening, don't take my word for it. Like get to chat, TVT or Google and type in benefits of creativity. It goes on for pages.
pages. There is, I always talk about multi-tool solutions because I'm busy. I don't have time to solve problems one at a time. I need a single tool that's going to solve multiple problems at once. If you look at the performance benefits, the emotional benefits, the health benefits, the longevity benefits, the intelligence benefits, the financial benefits, I could keep going. It's literally pages and pages. And on top of all of it, creativity is a flow trigger in the actual
Act of creativity. So creativity is a multi-stage process. Most people when we're talking about thinking creativity, they're thinking about like getting a good idea, a new idea, like in spray insight. That's what they're thinking about. But there's an actual process there. It's packed with flow triggers. Creativity is the highest flow activity we can get. And if you master creativity, it also gives you a huge creative edge. I will also like, just, Peter DeBandison, I just finished writing a new book.
on accelerated technology and how to thrive in the world ahead. And we talked to everybody you could possibly imagine for the book. if there, and these were experts in dozens of different fields, biotechnology, robotics, AI, doesn't matter. And experts never agree on anything as you know, and all these experts agreed on one thing, and I agree completely, which is.
over the next 10 to 20 years, for sure. It might not be true after that, but definitely for the next 20 years, creatives in flow who can collaborate with each other and with AI will own the future. Full stop, period. We know if you resilience, at the core of resilience is adaptive flexibility. Adaptive flexibility is a fancy way of saying create, create problem solving, right?
Steven (01:10:59.434)
If you want to thrive in the 21st century, that's the most important skill, right? And it all comes down to creativity. And here's the coolest fucking thing about all of this. Nobody trains creativity. It's like the forgotten skill. We train motivation. We set goals. We do all this stuff. We literally do all this stuff. And everybody wants more and more and more. And I don't have time for creativity. Start microdosing creativity into your day. Just like do it.
Tim Doyle (01:11:12.374)
Hmm.
Steven (01:11:27.726)
10 minute drawing exercise, 10 minute writing exercise. Something fun, something playful, something creative, and just do it every day for a month and see what happens to your life. Run the experiment. It's shocking how potent creativity is an intervention for. And most importantly, in my work around peak performance aging, the origin of aging turns people off, it's bad word. The longevity. In my work on longevity, that's the buzzword today. In my work on longevity.
as we move into our late forties and our fifties, we actually get treated. We, a whole suite of cognitive superpowers start coming online. We get access to new levels of intelligence and empathy and wisdom and perspective taking all this other stuff and creativity. But it's if that it's a moderate psychologist, call it a moderate and if then condition only get access to the stuff. If your brain is thinking creatively. So there's a whole bunch of people in the peak performance space who are now like building.
sort of apps for older people that train them in creativity for this very reason. And this is not new stuff. This is Gene Cohn's work going back to the 70s or 80s. It's sort of like the pre-performance aging as a field was founded on Ellen Langer's work and Gene Cohn's work. This was the discovery. Holy shit. We don't get dumber when we age. We get smarter. We get better. get, whoa, right? And it has huge protection against dementia and Alzheimer's. And here's a crazy stat that I can't. So.
I need to double check this coming up. No, I'm not gonna give it to you. It's a stat I can't back up and I don't know if it's real. let's just say that creativity is so, the stats on creativity being neuroprotective against dementia, cognitive decline are a little crazy. Like the number I wanna give you is that stat, but I actually, it's so crazy that I actually wanna stop and I just saw it. Like I was doing research into creativity like a week ago.
And it popped up, and I was like, that stat is crazy, that can't be real, I gotta go back to it. And I was about to give you a stat that I haven't double checked, so let me not double check it. But that's the, it's a weird one, like how neuroprotective it is against cognitive decline. So it's this incredible, it's like we have this super muscle inside of us that none of us train so we don't even know it's there, and it confers really significant advantages. Is it where I would start you? No, no, no, I would start with motivation.
Steven (01:13:52.898)
Then we do learning and then creativity. But the other thing is this, and here's the final point. Flow is a very creative state. And if you're not actually training creativity, it's hard to stabilize creativity. Flow, I'll give you a classic example. So we talked about one of the classic flow problems. Here's another classic mistake, peak performance error thing that happens fairly frequently to people is,
Flow's like a, it's a turbo boost, right? It's like the car going 100 miles an hour. And when the car is going 20 miles an hour, hit a tree, you have a fender bender. But when it's going 100 miles an hour and you hit a tree, you have a problem. And flow is this massive acceleration and it's built on uplevel and motivation, learning and creativity. But if you don't train those skills out of flow, it's like you've got a car going 100 miles an hour and all the wheels are loose. Sooner or later,
right, sooner or later. And creativity is where a lot of people get derailed because it's the thing they don't train. These days everybody's so down with a peak performance and I want to train this stuff and I want to do this stuff. And it's...
They're attacking it like, everybody attacks it like as if Anders Eriksson's ideas about deliberate practice were right across the board. Anders was a friend of mine, I really like his work. He said, they're great if you're trying to learn something like math or violin, but in most every other situation, deliberate play outperforms deliberate practice. It's a creative learning style. Why? Play gives us more, neuro-complex more, don't mean better chance it'll go from short-term holding to long-term storage, we learn better. So it amplifies it.
and all these things tie back to creativity. if you're at this point in your journey and you really want to, that's why I'm doing the Alliance, right? For any of you who's curious, flowalliance.co, www.flowalliance.co. You can just check it out there. But it's just this, was like, holy crap, everybody's coming to me. They've been training with me for like five years now. I've trained a fuck ton of people and they want to keep training.
Steven (01:16:06.254)
And I was like, well, what are they missing? What's missing? I would talk to them and I was like, my God, it's this creative, it's this like crazy muscle. And so yeah, I talk like an artist and I come out of those cultures and I'm weird and I'm all those things that artists are. But as a peak performance guy, this is a really big lever and it's a lever that most people aren't training because it feels flimsy. It doesn't feel real to most people, right?
that it's hard for me to convince you that you're going to get way more productive by getting more creative. That doesn't seem to correlate. It does because creativity drives flow and flow drives productivity. And like, you you're there. But the thing I was going to say where people train flow, get into flow before they're ready to have a trade creativity. This is where they get derailed by tangents. So you see writers all the time. They're like, how do you like not get distracted? And I'm like, yeah, this is because you haven't you haven't mastered.
creativity yet, you don't sort of understand how the process works. And people who are better at creativity, how to avoid writer's block, how to avoid innovators block, know your starts and endings, know where you starting and where you're going. Your brain is a pattern recognition system. It'll connect the dots automatically. But if you don't know where you're going, you same reason, we like clear goals, we're goal-directed systems. So if you don't give the brain a goal, it doesn't know where to go. And then tantrums are deletion. Let's go in that direction. And that happens in, you know,
the art of storytelling known as novel writing, it also happens in the art of storytelling known as starting a company, right? You get distracted by all the shiny new products and whatever, and you forget that your job is to sell this, not to do all those other things. You see it as the same problem. It's a flow problem. It's what happens when people haven't actually mastered creativity. They don't understand the amount of focus and training that it, creative is a big fire hose. have to, you know, it's a weapon. You gotta know how to wield it.
And with that, it's...
Tim Doyle (01:18:07.38)
You've dedicated.
Steven (01:18:10.222)
Pardon me. One last question.
Tim Doyle (01:18:10.4)
Can I do one last question?
You've dedicated yourself to learning about flow state. What do you think you've learned about yourself in the process?
Steven (01:18:23.576)
I don't know, you pick a neighborhood. In which direction do you want me to answer that question? I've learned a ton about myself in the process. I think, well, let me actually answer it the way that I, the most human answer I can give you is I think I've learned the same lesson that everybody learns on a high flow path, which is, holy shit, I had no idea what I was capable of. Right? Like that's, that's the experience of, that's what flow brings to a life where you're like, my God, I can't believe I got this far. my God, I can't like,
Tim Doyle (01:18:44.31)
Mm.
Steven (01:18:53.666)
That's what happens. It's compound interest. And the fun part about like being on the compounding side of it is the stuff that starts showing up in your life is wildly beyond your imagination. That's what gets really interesting is what flow leads you to a path where you're like, wow, I actually am living a life now that is beyond anything I could have imagined. I've gotten farther than I actually thought, right? That's what a path flow. And that's like, that's what it's taught me about me. Cause you know,
I was a remarkably ordinary kid. Remarkably, I think I've been a remarkably ordinary all the way, but I've gotten pretty far and way farther than, you know, I thought I was gonna, way farther than most people thought I was gonna get. I most people thought I was gonna be dead when I was 30 and when I was a little kid, I was literally the kid that parents warned their other children not to play with. Don't play with Steven, he's crazy, he's dangerous. Yeah, I was that kid.
And by the way, I was crazy and I was dangerous and you probably shouldn't have had like, that was good advice. Like it wasn't like, I'm not mad at that. Like they were giving their kids good advice. Like really, I was solid. You were helping.
Tim Doyle (01:20:03.286)
Stephen have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation today. Where can people go to see more of your work with FlowState and everything there?
Steven (01:20:12.844)
Yeah, stevencotler.com, flowalliance.co. Wanna see the work that we did at Flow Research Collective, the hardcore neuroscience research, flowresearchcollective.com. I'm at Steven Cotler on the socials.
Tim Doyle (01:20:31.274)
Awesome, great speaking with you today.
Steven (01:20:33.57)
That was really fun Tim. You did your homework. Thank you for that. I appreciate that.
