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Unlock Peak Performance & Get More Flow In Your Life with Steven Kotler

Lace Gilger
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**CONTAINS PROFANITY**

In this episode, we discuss the science of peak performance and share actionable takeaways for how you can achieve your goals and spend more time in the powerful state of Flow with our guest Steven Kotler. 

Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. He is the author of nine bestsellers (out of thirteen books total), including The Art of Impossible, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 40 languages, and appeared in over 100 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, TIME, and the Harvard Business Review. Steven is also the cohost of Flow Research Collective Radio, a top ten iTunes science podcast. Along with his wife, author Joy Nicholson, he is the co-founder of the Rancho de Chihuahua, a hospice and special needs dog sanctuary.

  • Peak performance is nothing more or nothing less than getting our biology to work FOR us rather than working AGAINST us

  • Human beings come with the built-in features and capability to peak performance

  • The neurobiology of flow is present in all mammals and humans are hyper-optimized for flow

  • Evolution shaped human beings, and humans were predominately shaped by the evolutionary scarcity of resources

  • Our biology creates the toolkit for performance - fight, flight, creativity, collaboration, etc - evolution created this tool kit, and we need to learn to understand and optimize these tools for our gain.

  • Getting more flow is easier, sustaining flow is much harder

    • If your foundation is not solid, you can’t handle the turbo boost

  • Big picture - when you are talking about peak performance, you’re talking about the motivation required to get into the game.

    • Goals tell you where to go.

    • Grit to stay in the game when motivation runs out.

    • Learning lets you grow and play

    • Creative problem solving is how you steer.

    • You need FLOW to turbo-boost the whole equation.

  • Motivation is often misunderstood, the research shows exactly how to build more motivation

    • Safety & security FIRST. You need a baseline. Happiness and wellbeing move in lockstep with performance until you get to the “Baseline.” Of around $75k/year.

      • Once you get there, external motivators stop generating out sized performance.

      • The measurable impact on performance, productivity, etc diverges from there

    • After that, you need to lean on your internal motivators.

  • Internal motivators enhance your focus.

  • Five Internal Motivators (they work IN ORDER and are BUILT ON TOP OF EACH OTHER)

    • Curiosity helps generate focus

    • Passion = intersection of multiple curiosities

    • Purpose = curiosity + a mission beyond yourself

    • Autonomy & freedom to pursue your purpose (4-5 hrs a week is enough)

    • Mastery, layering in the skills necessary to execute and do this.

  • “Surrounding a problem” - try to approach a problem from every aspect.

  • You need 3 tiers of goal setting

    • Mission

    • “High Hard” goals (steps needed to accomplish the mission)

      • 1-5 year timeline

    • Clear Goals / Daily To-Dos (Action Items)

  • Setting the right high-hard goals gives you 25% more motivation

  • Your goals are your filters. Your goals should determine what you say NO to.

  • If you want to perform at your best, everything has to be fully aligned.

  • If you’re gonna get distracted off your mission-level filters.

  • Make a list of your top ten pleasures. Get distracted by something you enjoy.

  • The biggest place people go wrong is

  • We have no idea what we will be good at or like in advance, we have to DO IT. You have to explore different things.

  • The biology of success does NOT happen overnight. You don’t

  • Passion is earned over time, one little victory at a time. It takes a LOT to get there.

  • Peak performers know it’s ALWAYS crawl, walk, run. Average performs go straight to jog/run, burn energy on the shortcuts, and try to short circuit the process.

    • There are LONG stretches of unpleasant along the way.

  • Pay attention to a few key things:

    • Vocabulary / Terminology - find a friendly/simple way to learn the terminology (fiction, easy ways to get familiar with the basic concepts, and natural curiosity).

      • 50% of expertise is just the vocabulary.

    • History - Our brains love narratives and cause and effect. We love natural storytelling.

    • Natural curiosity - find the things you’re naturally curious about.

  • “The 5 Books of Stupid"

    • Da Vinci Code - start with simple, easy, fictional, or easy to digest

    • “Blink” - pop science, but nothing too heavy yet.

    • “Thinking Fast & Slow” - more technical

    • Textbook, really hard & detailed book

    • Macroscopic book - looks into future or past to see boundary conditions, this is sane, this is crazy, etc.

  • After the 5 books of stupid, then start interviewing experts and asking them questions. Once the experts say to you “that’s a really good question” you’re starting to know what you’re talking about and you're starting to think inside the subject.

  • Flow is not a light switch, it’s a four-stage process.

  • The front end of a flow state is a STRUGGLE stage.

  • In your working memory, you can hold onto about 4 concepts at a time. The struggle phase is being at the brink of frustration, pushing your mind to its limits.

  • STRUGGLE IS BUILT INTO THE LEARNING CYCLE.

  • Turn your actions into habits, internalize the learnings into the subconscious.

  • “Follow the biology” - train grit before you train flow.

  • It’s easy to train grit, but it ALWAYS feels terrible. A lot of training grit is learning that you can perform at your best no matter how bad it feels. Trust that no matter how bad it feels you will still be able to perform at your best.

  • You have to learn to believe in your grit.

  • To train grit, it has to start PHYSICALLY. Period. Regular exercise is an opportunity to train grit. Push yourself. Get uncomfortable.

  • "If you’re not exercising regularly, forget peak performance."

  • Once you get physically gritty, you can start training cognitive grit.

  • The next level is THOUGHT CONTROL. Take control of the brain's thought patterns and shape them.

    • Separate between emotion and reaction.

  • Grit to be your best when you’re at your worst. This is an entirely different kind of grit.

    • Example: Give a speech while you’re trying to hike up a mountain.

  • Grit to train up your weaknesses. This is unpleasant.

  • Grit to use FEAR as a primary motivator. Start working with FEAR and using it as a major motivator. Get a handle on it and learn how to use it. It’s FREE focus if you can learn to harness it.

  • The Grit to RECOVER. You have to slow down, stop, recover, and relax. Recovery and relaxation are a KEY grit skill. Passive recovery does not work (TV and bar), you need active recovery - massages, breath work, epsom salt bath, saunas, foam rollers.

  • How do you apply peak performance to more complex skills like a business?

    • Break these skills down into micro-skills and focus on crawl, walk, run in EACH of those.

  • Homework: If there is one lever you can reach for, your flow trigger from childhood, don’t give up on that trigger. Flow is a focusing skill - it shows up when all our attention is on the here and now.

    • The more flow you get, the more flow you get. If you play video games on Monday and get into a flow state, you are more likely to get into a flow state at work.

    • Dropping into flow resets the nervous system and flushes stress neurochemicals, and boosts your immune system.

    • This is a GREAT way to get flow in your life.

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet, bringing the world's top experts right to you. Introducing your hosts; Matt Bodnar and Austin Fabel.

[00:00:19] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 5 million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. In this episode, we discuss the science of peak performance and share actionable takeaways for how you can achieve your goals and spend more time in the powerful state of flow, with our guest, Steven Kotler.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our email list. We have some amazing content on there along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How to Create Time For What Matters Most in Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com, you can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word SMARTER to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we interviewed the godfather of influence, Dr. Robert Cialdini, and shared some of the most powerful lessons from the science and art of influence.

Please note, this episode contains profanity.

Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. He’s one of the world’s leading experts on human performance and he’s the author of 9 bestsellers, including The Art of Impossible, The Future is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 40 languages and appeared in over a hundred publications including New York Times, Wired, Atlantic, Time and the Harvard Business Review.

[00:02:10] MB: Steven, welcome back to The Science of Success.

[00:02:13] SK: Good to be with you, Matt. How are you?

[00:02:14] MB: We’re super excited to have you back, and I’m doing well. I’d love to start with, I know you’ve produced so much fascinating work, Bold, Abundance, some of my all-time favorites from your earlier collection, Stealing Fire is so interesting. But Art of Impossible really tackles a number of concepts that I think are so important. And I’d love to start out with a broad question that we can really sink our teeth into, which is this notion of being a peak performer. What does it mean to you to be a peak performer and what do we have to do to become peak performers?

[00:02:49] SK: So I think there are a couple of quick answers to that question, Matt. I mean the first is that peak performance is nothing more or I guess nothing less than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. Human beings, we come with the capability for peak performance built-in. It’s a built-in feature of being human. Everybody is hard-wired for peak performance. So it’s really a question of just understanding how the system works and getting the system work for you.

[00:03:18] MB: Let’s dig into that. Tell me about this idea that we are hard-wired for peak performance and how do we end up getting in our own way?

[00:03:26] SK: So in a simple way, the easiest place to start is with the fact that every human in the planet is hard-wired to enter the state of consciousness known as flow. Flow is technically defined as optimal performance. It’s a state where we feel our best and we perform our best and is literally a built-in feature of not even just being human, of at this point being a mammal. Meaning the neurobiology, the hard wire and underpinning flow is present in all mammals and it’s hyper-developed in humans.

So the first thing is that flow is how we do peak performance and it’s available to all of us. So that’s sort of where it starts. If you want to take it a step further, you have to start with a weird thing, which is flow optimizes a whole bunch of stuff. If you look under the hood, and researchers, psychologists and neuroscientists have spent the past 30, 35 years, 40 years trying to figure out exactly what is flow great for? What is it optimized? And the list is fairly long. It’s motivation, productivity, creativity, creative problem solving, all aspects of creativity, learning, grit, empathy, environmental awareness. I mean it’s a bunch of stuff on the physical side, it strikes down, etc., etc. And the first question you got to ask yourself when somebody gives you a list of this one state of consciousness does all of these. You got to ask yourself, “Well, what the hell is going on? Why is that even possible? Those doesn’t make sense.”

And the answer is, once again, evolution. And evolution shaped human beings, and evolution itself will shape predominantly by scarcity, scarcity of resources. And when resources are scarce, you have two options. You can fight to over-dwindling resources, or you can get innovative, get exploratory, get creative, get collaborative, get cooperative and make new resources. Literally, everything that’s optimized by flow is all that stuff, which we can use to either fight of flee over resources or get creative, get collaborative, work together and make new resources. That’s actually the full suite of our biology. That’s the tool kit. So all that stuff that I just listed, that is the full kind of biological suite. Those are all the tools in our tool kit. And the interesting thing, sort of asked about peak performance. And I think every peak performer intuitively reaches for the same tools, because we're all biologically hardwired. So if you start talking to peak performers, which is what I've done for 30 years about, “Hey, what it is that you're working on kind of thing?” It's a very limited set of skills. Why? Because we're all drawn from the same tool kit. And the funny thing is the tools – And this is what we're learning only over the past five to ten years in a sense is that, “Hey, it's a system. The system is designed to work in a certain order. It's designed to work in a certain way. And if you can get it working for you, this is peak performance.

[00:06:27] MB: That's a really interesting notion, this idea that evolution essentially created the framework, the toolkit for performance, whether it's fighting, fleeing, being creative, collaborating, etc. And the journey for peak performance is really a journey about, first, understanding what our toolkit looks like and then learning how to use it for our own benefit.

[00:06:49] SK: With the Flow Research Collective, and we train at this – For those of you who don't know what the Flow Research Collective, is we're a research and training organization. We study the neurobiology of peak human performance. I think we're actually the largest peak performance research and training foundation in the world at this point. On the research side, we’re partnered with USC, UCLA, Imperial College London, Deloitte, a whole bunch of other people studying kind of studying the neurobiology. And on the training side we train everybody from the US Special Forces, through Olympic athletes, through the general public. And we train a lot of people like thousands of people a month on average. So we have enormous data sets on this sort of stuff first of all. So it's one of the things that's really interesting. It’s not only to peak performer reach for these same tools. Everybody reaches for the same tools.

And it's funny, if you ask where did this book come from, one of the places it came from was this work on flow, because it's actually remarkably easy to train people up in how do you get more flow. It's just not easy to stabilize that turbo boost in everybody. Peak performers, like if you train up US Navy Seals and flow, they get it almost immediately and they start getting immediate results. A lot of other people start backsliding almost immediately and they'll get more flow, but they can't sustain it, which is incredibly frustrating. And it comes down to all the shit that flow amplifies; motivation, learning, creativity, etc., etc., everything we're talking about. If your foundation isn't solid, you can't handle the turbo boost. This is another reason why a lot of people don't realize that they're optimized for peak performance, because they'll get periodic flow in their life, but they won't realize, “Hey, this is reliable. This is repeatable,” Because the other stuff isn't dialed in yet.

[00:08:32] MB: I love that learning and this idea that it's much easier to get into flow states, but the challenge for most of us is maintaining them. Tell me a little bit about how we cultivate that solid foundation. What does that look like from a habits and routine standpoint? From an execution standpoint? And how do we use that to sustain our flow much longer?

[00:08:54] SK: So I'm going to give you big picture look. We're going to drill down a level and then we're going to drill down a level. But the big picture look is this, when you're talking about peak human performance, you're talking about the motivation required to get into the game. You need goals, because it tells you where you want to go. You're going to then need grit, because it's how you sort of sustain things when that motivation runs out. You need learning, because it's what allows you to grow and continue to play. You need creativity to create problem solving because it's how you steer, especially if you're going after the kind of high, hard goals, so-called impossible goals where there's not really a clear map between where you are and where you want to get to. You have to have creativity. And then you need flow to sort of turbo boost the whole equation. So that's the whole system. That's what we're looking at.

And I said it starts with motivation. And motivation is sort of a catch-all term for a lot of different things, but here's what the research shows. Basically says that at the frontend you don't have to start here, but it's really hard to work around this. You sort of got to start with basic safety and security stuff. Meaning the first motivator that really matters. Normally we're going to talk most of our time about intrinsic, internal motivators, but you've got to start with an external. The data is pretty clear that it's very hard to achieve peak performance if safety and security issues are still a concern. And this is sort of Daniel Kahneman's research more than anybody else. But Daniel discovered that happiness and well-being and productivity and performance and all that stuff moves in lockstep until we make about $75,000 a year. That's enough in today's economy to cover depending on – Like he was measuring it mostly in city environments where people's rents were a lot higher. But it's enough to sort of pay your rent, pay all your bills and have a little left over for discretionary spending. And once you're there, external motivators are no longer going to get you more performance. They stop working, which is not to say they stop motivating us and we don't want them. That's not what I'm saying. The want is still there, but the actual impact on measurable performance things, performance productivity, those sorts of things diverge about $75,000 a year. And then you have to lean on your internal motivators.

Now there are five major internal motivators and they're actually all designed to work in an order and they're designed to be built on top of each other. We start with curiosity. Curiosity is our foundational, most basic motivator. First of all, what's the big deal about a motivator? Like why do we care about internal motivators? What they give us is focus for free. Brain is two percent of our body weight, consumes 25% of our energy at rest. When we're paying attention to something, it's even more. Think about how hard is it to pay attention to something that you're not particularly interested in. It's tough. It's difficult. You burn out very quickly.

Research shows that most of us can't sustain attention on stuff that we're not interested in for much more than eight, nine minutes at a time, and that's really good. So curiosity though, think about stuff you're curious about. You just pay attention to it automatically. You get focus for free. That's the big deal. Curiosity is actually designed to be built into passion. So if you can find the intersection of multiple curiosities, you literally get the recipe for passion. If you're going to task that intersection or a cause greater than yourself, then you start to get purpose. Once you have purpose, “Well, what do you need?” Oh! You need the freedom and the autonomy to pursue that purpose. Okay, once I have that, what do I need next? Mastery, the skills to pursue that purpose well.

Now there are all kinds of other internal intrinsic motivators we could talk about, but those are the big five. They get you the largest kind of biological response and they'll get you the farthest. And if you start there, you're really cooking. And by the way, if you're listening to this and you're wondering how the hell do I do that, www.passionrecipe.com. This is where Art of Impossible starts. We turned it into a free interactive workbook for anybody because so many people were like, “Oh my God! How do I cultivate passion? How do I get purpose? That's so important to me and I don't know how to find it.” There's actually a formula. It doesn't happen overnight. And do not be impatient with the process. You literally do not want to be two years into a passion or purpose to discover, “Oh shit! It was only a phase.” That is massively demotivating. It's really hard to get back into the fight after that happens. So start slowly, but work your way through the sequence. But that's there for anybody listening.

[00:13:35] MB: Very insightful, and we'll be sure to include that tool in the show notes as well. So we start with curiosity, multiple curiosities come together to form a passion. Then we tie in an external mission. That generates purpose. And you started going really fast after that. So walk me through one more time.

[00:13:51] SK: Then you need autonomy, which is the freedom to pursue your purpose. If you go into Art of Autonomy, we actually – There have been studies on how much autonomy you actually need and it's a lot less than you would even think. If you can divide it up daily, but it's literally about an afternoon, a week is enough to sort of really start harnessing this motivator. But you can sort of do it in smaller chunks than that if you want to go after a daily basis. And once you have autonomy, you need to start walking the path to mastery. You need to start layering in all the skills that you're going to need to master your craft. And I like to think about. This isn't exactly an Art of Impossible. It's there in bits and pieces. I like to surround a problem.

So when I'm trying to learn something, I want to go 360 degrees around it. I'm going to learn every aspect of it. So I sort of have 360 degree expertise to pursue mastery kind of thing and really get it working for me as a motivator. And of course once you get the big five layered in, goals are next and you probably covered that a bunch on the show other times. The research shows you need three tiers of goal setting. You need to set a mission level goals for your life. You need high hard goals, which are all the small steps you would need to take to accomplish your mission. So if your mission is, “I want to be the greatest writer in the history of the universe. “Your high, hard goals would be things like, “I want to go to college and get a degree in creative writing.” “I want to take a job on a newspaper and learn how to cover a story.” “I want to write a book on cooking or healthcare,” or take your pick, right? Those are high, hard goals. Usually things that are one to five-year timeline horizon goals.

And then you need clear goals, and these are the daily to-do lists. And there's specific ways to set clear goals lists to maximize their effectiveness and all that stuff. But, literally, it's what do I do today that is going to help me achieve my hard goals? When your high, hard goal is lined up with your mission level goals, which are, again, your purpose, right? You need all of those sets sort of in that order to maximize your biology. And, again, big deal here for motivation. Just at the high, hard goal level. This is not my work. This is Lock and Latham, sort of the godfathers of modern goal setting theory. But they found that just setting a proper high, hard goal gives you an 11% to 25% boost in motivation. So think about that for a second. Eight-hour a day is your baseline. That's like getting two free hours of work simply for spilling the right context around the work you're going to do anyways.

[00:16:21] MB: So insightful. And I love how all those things fit together and it's so important. It's amazing when you look at people how often there's either a total disconnect or just nothing to do with their daily activity and their goals or their hopes and dreams and tying those things together with daily action items that are pointing you in the direction of your short and medium-term goals and ultimately your long-term mission goals can be transformative for your life.

[00:16:47] SK: I think you got to take it one step further, which is I think you have to really think about your goals and your tiered goals and especially your mission level goals. These are filters. We often tend to think as people that we're defined by our yeses. Those things we're saying yes to, right? They stick with us a little bit more. I made this decision. But we're very defined by our no's very, very, very much. And mission level goals, for example, are a first filter, right? I have three sort of mission level goals in my life. And every day I try to take one step towards each of those. Then there's you know another category of things in my life that is like all the stuff I have to do to support the mission level goals. Then I've got friends and family who I want to attend to on a daily basis. And one other thing that I do, and those six categories are my first filter. Meaning if shit comes my way, I don't care how big the opportunity is. If it doesn't slot into those six categories, I pass. Predominantly, because if it doesn't slide into those six categories, I know if I really want to perform at my best, everything's got to be aligned. All my intrinsic motivators have to be pointed in the same direction. They got to be tied in my values and my strengths and everything's got to be moving towards the same direction. And when they are, peak performance is about just showing up and doing the thing. A lot of the hard work happens on. I mean you still have to do the hard work, don't get me wrong, of course. But a lot of the stuff that you would be fighting against normally you just stop fighting as you get farther faster.

[00:18:22] MB: That makes a lot of sense. So the idea is essentially that I love the notion of your goals as filters and the mechanism for you to say no to things. And this idea that you're describing is essentially the notion that if we really want to be peak performers, every single card in the deck needs to be stacked in our favor. And if you're doing things that maybe fit 30% or 60% or 70% of your goals and your values, you're never going to be able to get every factor stacked in your favor and you're ultimately not going to be able to perform at the potential that you could perform at if you had everything in alignment.

[00:18:57] SK: And let me give it to you another way too, because this isn't in the book at all, but we run this sometimes with our clients. And I think since we're on this topic, it's another useful filter, because I think people just don't – We make the mistake of not trusting our own history. So make a list. If you're going to get distracted, right? If you're going to get distracted off your mission level things off these filters, you better make sure it's a damn great distraction. So make a list of your top 10 pleasures. The things in your life. Like if you're going to get distracted, get distracted by a serious hedonic pleasure. Something that really, really, really works.

And so for me, I got a list, and I got my six filters and then I got 10 things that are the great pleasures. And so I only – Literally, if it doesn't fit into the six categories, if it's going to distract me from one of those and it doesn't fit in these 10 filters, it's a total no, because then I'm just clearly literally wasting my time. I'm not aiming towards my goals or my values or who I am and I'm not even aiming towards a distraction that's worth a damn because I would rather save up my distraction time for something that matters, that I really loved.

[00:20:02] MB: Yeah. That's such a great insight. And the older I get, the more the advice and the guidance of your life is really determined by your no’s means more and more to me.

[00:20:11] SK: Joan Didion once said, one of my favorite authors, she once said when you're young, you think you can pay any sort of emotional tax and it'll all be worth it in the end because you're gaining the experience. You get to a certain age and you're just like, “Oh wow! That's just a lot of emotion.” There's no real experience there. I had that rollercoaster before. I'm just going to skip that this time around.

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[00:22:34] MB: So bringing us back to tying this into the framework for peak performance, I want to look at across the things that you've shared so far. Where do you typically see people falling short in their daily lives or going wrong with starting to put some of these practices in place?

[00:22:53] SK: So the stuff we've been talking about onboarding-wise, everything we've come up to now, I think is sort of the onboarding stuff. And biggest place people go wrong there is they don't spend. So there's a process for exploring the intersections of curiosities and really playing there. And what the research shows is that, first of all, we have no idea what we're going to be good at or like in advance. We have to do it. So, one, people also – If they're like, “Oh wow! I'm really curious about this thing and I'm really curious about this thing,” and they intersect right at this weird place. Let me start exploring that. If it requires any skill onboarding – You know what I mean? People get derailed by the fact that learning anything you're bad until you're better, it's going to suck no matter what. So that's the obvious one that derails people. But the other side of that I think is worse, and you see this a lot with go-getters, entrepreneurs, etc., etc., is they want it to happen overnight. And literally the biology is not designed to work overnight. It will not. It doesn't happen that way.

So people at the frontend of a quest to get to passion, right? I say what does passion look like, Matt? And you're like give me an example of athletic passion. The average answer you're going to get is Lebron James, windmill scowling his way to a rim-shattering dunk in the NBA finals. That's what passion looks like. And your passion just looks like a little kid in a backyard shooting a basketball through a hoop hoping it's going to go through, right? That's what it looks like on the frontend, and we forget that. So people get derailed by the fact that they're like, “Wow! This doesn't feel like passion.” I'm curious. They don't realize that passion is earned over time, one step at a time, one little victory at a time, and it takes a lot to get there and takes a lot to find out what's real, what's just a phase and what's not. It's when patience derails a lot of people. They don't trust the process and they come out early.

[00:24:54] MB: When do we know when to keep going with a curiosity versus when to cut our losses and move on to something else that has our interest?

[00:25:02] SK: That's an open question, and I have never lost any of my curiosities. Some of them have gone away for years at a time and then come back, because I've sort of learned everything up to a certain point I got to go learn a bunch of other stuff. So I don't necessarily know if they ever go away. But when I notice things are wrong, is when I'm working really hard day after day to pay attention for a very long stretch of time. And learning is always going to be sort of unpleasant. And Dr. Andrew Huberman who's at Stanford, we do a lot of work with him. He says something brilliant. He says, “One of the biggest differences between peak performers and everybody else is that peak performers know. It's always crawl, walk, run, and most everybody else gets into the situation and goes, “Yeah, man. I'm not really into crawling, and I'm not really the walking kind of gal. I'm going to start at a jog, okay? Just how do I start at a jog?” And they burn a lot of energy trying to figure out where are the shortcuts. How do I get farther? You know what I mean? And peak performers just know it's going to be crawl, walk, run and there's going to be long stretches of unpleasant on the way and that you shouldn't really start judging things until you really got a little bit of not total mastery, but you're starting to get a sense of how to think inside of the thing. And that's when I think it's enough.

And the way I explain it in the book is there's a process in the learning chapter I talk about as sort of the five books of stupid. It's a knowledge acquisition process. It's how basically to learn anything you want to learn. It's not fast, but I have found that if you take that process through to the end, by that point you now know enough to determine, “Hey, is this right for me or should I move on?”

[00:26:49] MB: Give me a brief synopsis of that learning process.

[00:26:53] SK: So the book is probably the science of impossible, except I'm a real stickler for words that mean what they're supposed to mean. And 95% of the book is science. 5% is based on a lot of stuff that I've learned along the way employed with a lot of people, but we don't have enough research to call it science. So I'm calling it art. This is one of those components. But I was a journalist for a very long time and it was freelance, and this was back when magazines had fact checkers. And fact checkers sort of got paid to make sure I was not screwing things up. And the way they sort of earned props with the editors was by proving writers wrong.

So if I wanted to work for Time Magazine, for example, they could say, “Hey, Steven, I need you to write about the neuroscience of goal setting,” say. I would know nothing about the neuroscience of goal setting I write about neuroscience, but this is new field, blah-blah-blah. And literally there are people who are getting paid to figure out did I fuck it up? And I won't work for them again if I screwed up too badly. So I have to learn it. I have to get it really right and my ability to feed myself depends on it.

And I covered very hard subjects and I was for a while one of the busiest freelancers in America. So I was working for – In the end it was a hundred total publications, but everybody could imagine. So I was covering a lot of stuff and I'd have to learn it and get to expert level very quickly, and this was the process I developed to do it.

What I discovered is that it starts with what I call the five books is stupid. And, again, you sort of want to follow your curiosity into a subject. So when you're starting to learn a subject, the first thing you care about is terminology and the easiest way to learn the terminology is a friendly way. Find the simplest, most popular book on the subject. I'm talking about if you're interested in learning about the Vatican, this is when you start with Dan Brown's the Da Vinci code kind of thing, literally. You just want to learn the terminology in the world a little bit. The more natural curiosity you have, the more norepinephrine and dopamine are going to be in your system, the easier it is going to be to learn. You're going to learn without having to work so hard. So start simple, fast. You want to go through it as fast as possible.

Next book up is slightly harder, right? This is like your Malcolm Gladwell level book, right? Let's say you want to learn about intuition. Blink, it would be a second book in the stack, right? This is popular book. It's not very hard. You're going to read it pretty quickly. You're going to learn a little bit more of the terminology. You're going to start to learn, “Oh, here's how experts think about this,” and you're going to more importantly start to learn a little bit of the history of the subject. And I always tell people, pay attention to two things, vocabulary and history. Vocabulary, meaning if terms shows up, don't write down every term and don't expect to understand everything you read and don't try to. You want to pay attention to only three things as you're reading all five of these books. Terminology that shows up three to five times and you go, “What the hell does that word mean? Okay, it's important.” Look it up. Every time you see it in print say the definition to yourself. Predominantly, because this is one of the things experts know that other people sort of learn the hard way, is that 50% of most subjects are contained within the vocabulary of the subject. If you can learn the expert vocabulary, you know a lot of what the experts know about. And vocabulary like neuroscience, most of the vocabulary is literally like place names in the brain or ways things work. A lot of it is contained within, right? When I say anterior cingulate cortex, I'm literally giving you a location in the brain. It's not a fancy word for a thing. It's a location. It tells you if you know how to speak neural anatomy, where something is. That's true in almost any subject. You also want to pay attention to the history. Why? Because our brains love narrative, we're cause and effect engines, right? We see things in the world and we go, “How did that happen and how do I make it happen again or how do I avoid it happening again?” We do cause and effect naturally. We do storytelling naturally if you have the narrative.

Science, for example, there's always a voyage of discovery. What happened first, second, third, fourth, fifth, et cetera? Pay attention to that. You have the big Christmas tree. All the facts you learn are ornaments along the way. So if you have those two things, you're starting to be dangerous. And then just pay attention to anything that captures your attention. Where the things you're naturally curious about, that's where you stop and you pause and you take a note or you think or you write down something. Those are the notes you take. Don't take notes everywhere. Don't care if you don't get everything that's going on. Pay attention to those things.

Third book is the first sort of technical book on the subject. This might be Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow if you're studying intuition, right? That's that book. Fourth book is the first really hard. This might be a textbook on the subject. And then the fifth book is usually a macroscopic book, something that looks into the future or at the past so you can figure out where are the boundary conditions. This is saying this is crazy. These are where the landlines lie. Maybe you're going to disagree with the experts, but you should know where people say the boundaries are. And I figure once you've gone through those five books, you often know enough to start asking experts questions. And that's when I start getting on the phone with people who really know what they're talking about and asking questions. It builds from there. But basically I tell people once the experts are saying things to you like, “Oh, wow! That's a really good question,” then you sort of know you're in the right place and you're starting to actually know what you're talking about. You're not yet an expert, but you're starting to be able to think inside the subject, and that's often enough to be able to judge, “Does this fit me right?”

[00:32:42] MB: Got it. That's a great explanation. I really like the methodology of breaking it down with book examples of how to start really simply and then start to get more and more technical. So after you've done that journey, that's when you think you can probably make a qualitative assessment of this field, this endeavor, this topic is something I enjoy or –

[00:33:03] SK: Yeah. I mean there's a bunch of different ways. I mean on a certain level, because you can spend a day studying something and feel like you're totally frustrated, right? You're not learning. You're not getting it, but you're still kind of deeply satisfied that you fought that battle. And we know what that feels like, right? Those are signs that even if you're not getting it, you're still in the right place. You know what I mean? Even though you're not learning a fucking thing but your life is still feeling pretty meaningful, you're probably still playing in the right kind of places. Those kinds of internal signals we're looking for.

[00:33:36] MB: And a minute ago you touched on something which you just said, again, which to me is a really important insight, which is this notion that peak performers understand that the journey contains parts where you're frustrated, where you're stuck, where you're angry, where you're crawling, where you're getting your butt kicked, and yet most average or underperformers don't understand that. They think they can go straight into running or jogging, et cetera. It's such an important insight.

[00:34:03] SK: And it's more than you know. Okay. So let me give you a simple example, flow optimal performance. Most people think flow is a light switch. Like you're in the zone or you're not. It's not a light switch. It's actually a four-stage process and each stage is underpinned by different changes in neurobiology. You've got to move through all four stages to get into flow and repeatedly getting the flow. So like what a really big explanation point on this, but once a month somebody comes up to me and says, “Oh, dude. You got to study me, man. I’m in flow all the time.” And I used to actually kind of run away at that point because I didn't know what to do and finally it's happened so much that I've decided the best thing I can do is tell the truth. And I now tell the truth, which is, “Oh, yeah. We got a word for that. We call that schizophrenia or mania.” That's not healthy. You can't live in flow. It doesn't work that way. You have to go through the whole cycle, and parts of the cycle are very un-flowy.

In fact, to your exact point, the frontend of a flow state is a struggle stage. Flow is what happens once we have automatized a bunch of behaviors. We can perform things automatically and the brain can start to combine this automatic action with that automated action to get a whole new level of performance. You still have to automatize that stuff. You still have to learn how to do it, right? And still going to be learning and learning.

It’s funny because our working memory, the amount of stuff we can think about consciously at one point, if we're trying to learn something like a skill or our card concepts, we can hold on to about four different things at once and then we are literally frustrated by design. And in the struggle phase you have to take yourself to the brink of frustration. Literally, it is a sign that you're moving in the right direction if peak performance is your goal. It still sucks on the inside, right? Like it just sucks. When you get best in the world, it still sucks. It's still hard. The emotions don't change. It's still an unpleasant experience.

But once you know, “Oh! This unpleasant experience means I’m moving in the right direction,” because you have to take your brain to the point of almost overloaded and then sort of take your mind off. The problem so your brain can pass it over to the unconscious and you can start to turn those actions into habits. That has to happen for peak performance, and that's an unconscious process. So brink of frustration and then turn it off. You got to let it go. Most people don't know that. So they don't realize that struggle is built in to the cycle. And in fact we've got new research that we're doing that shows that even in those instances where there's not a long struggle phase, like you're out for a mountain bike ride. If you want to get into flow, there's always going to be a moment like where you're riding along on the trail and suddenly the trail steepens and you're like, “Oh crap! I actually have to really burn energy here,” and you have a moment where you have to like lean in and grit your teeth and roar a little bit even if it's internally to get into it. That moment, you actually may have to trigger the fight response to get into flow. Fight and flee, freeze, these are separate responses in the brain, and fight actually might be required to get into flow. Meaning even at the micro scale, you may have to deal with that frustration and that struggle.

[00:37:20] MB: So many really important learnings from that, this idea of taking – And if you look across any field, whether it's chess, whether it's surfing, whether it's rock climbing, anything, you see the same pattern, which is this notion of taking your actions and turning them into habits. Internalizing all of these learnings into the subconscious so that your conscious mind can process the nuances, whether it's an MMA fight or a boxing match or a poker match, anything, you can really see the experts aren't thinking about 99% of the stuff that's already internalized. They're thinking about that one percent difference that you can't even see until you're years and years into the journey.

[00:38:01] SK: That is absolutely correct. What's cool about flow, because it takes place after you've mastered a bunch of stuff and because it's optimal performance, I like to say it's 360 degree creativity. Meaning within the activity, and when you're doing a thing that you've got that level of expertise at and you're in flow, whatever direction you go in is open to you, because you're performing at your best. You've got 360 degrees sort of creativity, which is my definition of what is mastery. It's the ability to be creative in 360 degrees off the thing that you're trying to be a master at.

[00:38:40] MB: I’m so excited to tell you that this episode is brought to you by my very good friend and three-time Science of Success guest, Peter Shallard. He's the founder of Commit Action and he's known as The Shrink for Entrepreneurs. Why is he sponsoring The Science of success? Well, January is a time when we're all thinking about setting goals and making strategic plans for the year. But if you don't get it right, your best intentions just end up gathering dust in a drawer. We've all experienced that before, right? Big ambitions in January, totally sidetracked by March.

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[00:40:43] MB: The other theme you talked about a moment ago, which is also really important, and correct me if you disagree with this characterization, but this notion that the struggles built into the learning cycle, this idea, it's almost like the concept of beginner's mind. When you go into anything, you have to understand that when you're starting it, you're going to be bad at it and you have to learn to love that part of the struggle and not give up because you're not innately going to be an expert day one of trying to shot put or surf or whatever that activity might be.

[00:41:16] SK: That is absolutely correct. That is really true. I mean that's why also grit skills, right? Once you get goals, there are six layers of grip to add in next before you get to learning how to learn. We skipped over that point, but the buyout there are six kinds of grit. If you're interested in peak performance, they all have to be trained independently in the beginning. In the end, you can start to blend them together. But in the beginning, you have to train them independently and you don't want to start doing it. Once you get your intrinsic motivators relined up and your goals dialed in, that alone will start producing more flow in your life. And once that happens, that's sort of this signal that you can start really leaning in and training grit. This was a thing that we used to run into the Flow Research Collective all the time. It’s one of the reasons that I wrote this book actually was this very thing, is I was looking at the biology and I was like, “Man, if you just follow the biology, you would train grit before you started training people in flow,” because flow is great. It's optimal performance. It feels amazing. But if you haven't trained in grit, and I start increasing the amount of flow in your life. Sooner or later the flow is going to go away. You're going to get to a struggle phase that's just too hard, too challenging and take a while to learn the new skills, to level up, whatever it is, right? And if you don't have the grit skills layered in, “Man, I've just turned up the amount of flow in your life, the happy juice and then I've cut it off,” it's bad.

Our clients when this was happening to them we're pissed, right? They're training us to get more flow and they're getting more flow and then it's going away. And I kept trying to figure out, “Well, guys, because they don't have the grit skills.” There are going to be times that flow and you need the grit skills, but you can't train grit effectively until people are starting to get more flow in their lives, because it's just miserable to train grit. We are so trainable. We can get so gritty. It's amazing. It's amazing how gritty we can get. It's amazing how easy it is actually to train grit. But the downside, it always feels terrible. Period. Like it just feels terrible. That's what crane and grit means.

And a lot of training grit is about learning that you can perform at your best no matter how bad it feels, and then step two, learning you can trust that no matter how bad it feels you're still going to be able to perform at your best, because you've done it enough times. And those are two separate things, right? It's really easy to go out on any given day and be gritty, “Oh! I just got to push harder than I would normally push.” But what it really takes to get gritty is we have to believe in our own grit. And we're slow learners when it comes to ourselves, right? Like you have to prove something to yourself over and over and over and over again before your brain is going to go, “Oh, you really are this gritty. So if like this is a life-threatening situation, I know you've got this.” That's sort of what your brain is looking for when it's sort of training grit. It's looking for the signal that you are gritty enough to handle this shit no matter what happens because then you don't have to worry. But then you don't have to produce any anxiety when you encounter that level of challenge because your brain goes, “Oh, you got this. You're this gritty. That's what you're sort of aiming for when you're training grit.” And it takes a while.

[00:44:33] MB: I know we could talk about this for an hour, but practically in a few minutes perhaps, what are some of the methodologies for training grit?

[00:44:42] SK: The body is funny. When it comes to grit, you got to start physically. You cannot start any place else. You have to start with whatever activity you do for exercise. And if you're not exercising regularly, forget peak performance, because it's too hard to control the anxiety levels in your body. Gratitude works really well for that. Mindfulness works very well for that. But exercise is sort of like the killer app for stress. And so regular exercise is really important to peak performance and it's an opportunity to train grit. And, literally, if yesterday you did sets of 10, today you're going to do one set of 11, right? And tomorrow maybe two sets of 11. And the day after that, three sets of 11. And slowly over time. And once you start getting physically gritty, you can start training cognitive grit. Like, “Okay, in the morning I used to allocate 90 minutes for my most important task and I could focus intently for 90 minutes. And tomorrow I’m going to try for 95,” right? That's cognitive kind of stuff.

Once those things are starting to lay in a little bit, then I think thought control is the next level. The grit to really take charge of your brain's kind of normal, natural, negative bias and the voice in your head. That's another reason that mindfulness matters, You've got to kind of get that separation between emotion and feeling, emotion and actual reaction and start really working on your thoughts. Once you're at that level, the next thing you want to start training is the grip to be your best when you're at your worst. This is an entirely different kind of grit.

So let me give you an example of what that might look like. I have to give speeches. And when I write a new speech, I’ll write the speech, I’ll practice it a handful of times, a couple times alone, a couple times with friends in the room. Easy audiences, whatever. I’m tuning it up. I’m getting it right. And then there's a day that I’ll wait till like I didn't get enough sleep the night before. I worked 10, 12, 15 hours. I go to the gym. I get a hard workout and I come home and I grab my dogs and I go hike up the mountain behind my house and deliver my speech. And I do that once before I give any speech in public. Because I can give a speech while hiking up a mountain and exhausted, I can give a speech under any conditions. And as a guy who travels around the world and give speeches for a living, any conditions happen. I've had everything you could possibly imagine go wrong, and I can stay calm in any conditions that I’m like, “Yeah, whatever you got, it's not going to be as hard as hiking up a mountain. I’m training to do my best when I’m at my worst. That's an example. You only want to start playing with that once you've layered in the other ones.

Once you've got that going on, it's the grit to train up your weaknesses, which are really unpleasant. But our next, then it's the grit to really start using fear as a primary motivator and start really working with fear. Fear is a fantastic motivator, but only if you've become very gritty along the way. Otherwise it's going to win biologically. But if you can really get a handle on it and start working with your fear, it's fantastic. Think about all the focus you get for free when something scares you. But it takes a little while to get there.

And the last one, most important one, this is really for peak performers, is the grit to recover. For peak performers, we don't like to slow down. Stop, rest, relax. Do any of that that feels like you're wasting time and peak performers have a very hard time with that. So recovery for peak performance is a grit skill. And if you're really going to perform at your best, the research shows passive recovery. TV and a beer does not work. You need an active recovery protocol. Epsom salt blast, long saunas, massage, foam rollers. Take your pick. Restorative yoga protocol, breath work, all these things are active recovery protocols and they're hard, man.

At the end of my work day, I've worked 10, 12, 13 hours a day. The last thing I want to do is get into a sauna and do 20 minutes worth of breath work. That's exactly what I try to do almost every day, because it allows me to keep going at this high level. It’s the grit to recover. So those are the six levels of grit and the order which appears we need to train them.

[00:48:55] MB: So many good insights. I’ll just leave this one statement you said here. We don't even need to get into it, but it's so important, which was if you're not exercising regularly, forget about peak performance. So many insightful lessons there. We could do a whole interview just on grit. I want to ask a different question or think about this in another way and put this all into some context. All the lessons you share about peak performance, etc., I see very clearly how you apply this to mastering a lot of skills. And by that I mean let's say you wanted to be the world's greatest chess player. I think I see how to apply these protocols. You want to be the world's greatest power lifter. I see how to apply these protocols. You want to be the world's greatest skydiver, whatever. I see how to do that. When you start to get into more business related or abstract concepts, let's say you want to be the world's greatest leader of a non-profit.

[00:49:43] SK: I always say, personality doesn't scale, biology scales. So what works for me will definitely not work for other people. But I will also tell you on this tip, I set out to be the greatest writer in the history of the universe. Now, I am smart enough to understand that there is no such thing. But don't kid yourself. I’m ferociously competitive in everything I do and I've wanted to be the greatest writer. At the Flow Research Collective, we set out to be the best evidence-based peak performance training in the history of the universe. I don't do anything unless I can be best at the world at it, and I do a lot of business stuff.

So all this stuff, and that was the point of this book really, is I wrote books about athletics. I've written books about all these various things. This is the book that I wrote for everyone. At the Flow Research Collective, we train a thousand people a month. And I would say 80% percent of them are C-suite executives. So this stuff is very business-focused in my mind and very applicable in business.

Where it gets a little tricky though is at the organizational level. I always say that at the organizational level, that's where we go from actual data science into case studies. With an individual, I know that your biology works a specific way. What's the biology of an organization? And is Microsoft’s biology different than Patagonia's, or GE, or the corner dry cleaner store?” Those are interesting questions I don't know if we have enough answers to yet. So that's where it starts to get a little more abstract, but I don't think the principles change at all.

[00:51:23] MB: Yeah, that's a really good insight. Do you think another component of this is – And, for example, being the greatest writer of all time, do you think about breaking that down into almost component pillars or micro skills that you work on? For example, I love the idea of speaking, right? You're working on your speech while you're giving a hike. That's a fantastic instance.

[00:51:43] SK: I mean I can answer this. There're so many different stories I can tell you, but the easiest one I could tell you is this lesson is in the book in a section where I talk about sustaining creativity over a career. But it was one of the first lessons I ever got taught. And I got taught in grad school with one of my first mentors who was a guy named John Barth. And John is often considered the godfather of like American meta-fiction, entire genre of fiction. That was sort of very dominant in his 50s and 60s and 70s. And I really was interested in it. It's a very complicated. We do fancy shit with language. Long story short, very fancy stuff and we were in his office one day we were talking about my favorite book. One of the most complicated books ever written. It was a book by Thomas Pynchon called Gravity's Rainbow. It's got like 800 characters in it. And we're talking about it. He's like, “Yeah, it's the fanciest book you've ever seen.” But in the middle of the damn book there is a 50-page section that is told in the plainest English known to man, and it's because it's where the central themes of the book are. And Barth point to me, he looked at me and said, “You can never have too many arrows in your quiver.” And what he meant was surround your craft. And when I train writers, I always show them a graphic of my career like this is the point that I first got paid six figures and seven figures for books. I mean like really lay it out. I also showed them the two different times in my career I went bankrupt and all the different things I've had to know how to write along the way to get to where I am, which you could say where I am wherever I am. But just to get to wherever I am, I've had to learn how to write grants, and marketing copy, and advertising copy, and song lyrics, and scripts, and books, and non-fiction books, and novels, and poems, and I could go on for like the next 25 minutes on all the different shit I've had to learn how to write, and they're all different skills.

I mean some of them cross over, but as a general rule, I had to crawl, walk, run in every one of these places. And that's just really fundamental. That level of hunger, if you're really interested in playing this game, you got to bring that. Because if you're interested in being best at the world at something, you're competing with people like me who are going to play it at this level in this way. So it's worth thinking about that at least.

[00:53:57] MB: Great examples and a really insightful way of thinking about that. For somebody who wants to start taking action, whether it's training their grit and finding their curiosities, etc., what would one action item be or action step you would give them to start implementing these ideas in their life today?

[00:54:16] SK: I’m going to comment this from a really weird angle. I’m going to give you something that you probably didn't expect, and this is not the answer to any of the shit you just asked me about. But when people say, “What's the single thing that I could do?” I used to say my general answer to what are the three things I can do Monday morning is fuck you, because there's no three things you can do Monday morning. Because if you're interested in this, it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday repeat. But I will say if there's one lever that you can reach for that you're probably not reaching for because it's so counterintuitive. So everybody has what we call a primary flow activity. So flow, those moments of uninterrupted concentration. When you get so sucked into what you're doing everything else just disappears. We all have a primary one. Meaning it's that thing you did growing up as a kid that you always got lost in. Like here's how you lost an afternoon. Maybe it was video games. Maybe was playing football with your friends. Maybe it was going for hikes. Maybe it was collecting stamps or doing magic or learning to dance hip-hop or whatever. We all have that thing. And as a general rule, as we become adults, that is the thing we stopped doing because we get responsible and we have jobs and we have careers and we have lives and families and etc., etc.

And the funny thing is flow is a focusing skill. Shows up when all our attention is in the here and now and it is trainable. It's a very particular kind of focus that is very trainable. And in general sense, the more flow you get, the more flow you get. So if you go out on monday and go skiing for an hour and drop into a flow state, you're actually going to have a better chance of getting into flow on Thursday at work, A. And B, this is not my work. This is Teresa Amabile’s at Harvard. But flow is a huge boost in creative problem solving. 400% to 700% depending on whose numbers you're looking at.

What Teresa discovered is that heightened creativity will outlast the flow state, which can be a 90-minute experience as a rule by a day, maybe two. So that in itself is reason to do it. The third reason is that when we drop into flow, it resets the nervous system. It flushes stress hormones out of our system and it replenishes them. We sort of feel good, performs enhancing neurochemicals that also boosts the immune system. So as a general rule, this one activity, the thing that we probably stopped doing, if we reintroduce it in our lives, it's going to make the biggest difference and it's going to start rekindling on a lot of other energy. So it's very counterintuitive. But first of all, if you're interested in grit, any of those things, your primary flow activity is a great place to start training grit and training some of those other things that you're interested in. But this is the thing I would tell you to start doing.

[00:57:09] MB: Steven, what I’m hearing from you is that I need to be playing more video games.

[00:57:14] SK: Well, if that was your thing. It wouldn’t be my thing. It would not work for me. I wish it would work for me. It'd be so much easier. But yeah, I mean if that was your thing, really, really, if that's what made your heart soar and really sucked you in and swallowed you whole, reboot it a little bit.

[00:57:31] MB: A great suggestion and really cool insights. So Steven, you've shared a couple resources already. But where can people find you? All of your tremendous work and everything that you're doing online?

[00:57:41] SK: For the book, theartofimpossible.com. That's easy. Me, stevenkotler.com. If you're interested in any of the flow stuff we've been talking about, flowresearchcollective.com.

[00:57:54] MB: Well, Steven, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Another fantastic conversation and really, really enjoyable. Thank you so much.

[00:58:02] SK: Matt, I appreciate your interest. Thank you for having me back.

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