May 3, 2024 • 53 mins
Steven Kotler’s journey towards understanding effective learning strategies took an unexpected turn during a period of profound illness. Struggling with his health challenges led him to delve into the concept of flow states, ultimately unraveling its transformative power. Through his personal ordeal and subsequent exploration, Steven not only gained insights into peak performance but also unearthed a universal truth about the human capacity for growth and resilience. His story serves as a compelling reminder of the untapped potential within each of us and the remarkable impact of effective learning strategies on our lives.
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Unlock your peak performance potential and experience the power of flow states
- Cultivate passion and grit to fuel your journey to success and fulfillment
- Discover effective learning strategies to enhance your understanding and retention of new subjects
- Harness the role of attention and curiosity to dive deeper into your areas of interest
- Understand motivation and master the art of goal-setting for personal and professional growth
To learn more, click here!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The internal experience of learning for everyone, everybody in the world.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Is I suck. I suck, I suck, suck, I suck.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Oh look, I don't suck anymore.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
(00:38):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. We
(01:12):
hope you'll enjoy this episode from the archive. Thanks for
joining us. Our guest on this episode is Stephen Kotler,
a New York Times bestselling author, award winning journalist, and
the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. Stephen is
one of the world's leading experts on human performance. He's
the author of thirteen books, nine of them best sellers,
(01:33):
including the Art of Impossible, A Peak Performance Primer.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
Hi Steven, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Good to be with you, Eric.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
Your book is called The Art of Impossible, A Peak
Performance Primer. And as I was telling you before the show,
I have taken perhaps as many notes on this book
as any I have read. So we've got a lot
of different ways we could take this conversation. But before
we get into it, we'll start, like we always do,
with a parable. There is a grandfather who talking with
his grandson in life, and he says, there's two wolves
(02:03):
inside of us that are always at battle. What is
a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
(02:24):
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
I don't know what it means to you in my
life for my work, but I can tell you what
it reminds me of, which is one of the really
sort of strange and interesting things about human biology and
unan performance is the system. Meaning our biology is designed
in a very weird way at every level to go
(02:51):
where you look, where you put your attention is where
you end up. And this is very very clear in
action sports, where I've done a lot of research where
if you want to, for example, surf a tube, everything
that has to take place in that tube takes place
basically too fast for you to react. All you can
really do is put your eyes on the end of
the tube and you go there. When you want to ski,
(03:13):
you're really hard, straight behind right, you get to the
point where you put your eyes on the exit and
you go there. We're goal directed machines on the internally,
and what that essentially means is we don't live in reality.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
We live in a.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
World that's shaped predominantly by our fears and our goals,
and in a sense, on an internal level, with those goals,
the way sort of consciousness of our biology is designed
to work.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Once again, you go.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Where you look, you go where you put your attention,
So I guess in a sense it depends on which
one you feed. Is roughly the same as a neurobiological principle,
which essentially, we go where we look, we go, we
put our attention.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Listener,
while you were listening to that, what resonated with you?
What one thing to feed your good Wolf comes to mind?
If the thing that came to your mind was more
time for stillness, or you've tried meditation before and you
really haven't liked it, then I want to give you
a quick tip that might make it better for you.
And it's simply to stop expecting that you're not going
(04:12):
to have thoughts. Nearly everyone has this expectation that they're
going to sit down and meditate and they're going to
stop having thoughts. And when they stop having thoughts, that
means they're doing it well. But no one does that,
and so we end up feeling like we're failing all
of the time. Every three seconds, failed again, failed again.
We develop a relationship with meditation that is aversive. So
(04:35):
if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find
it relaxing, check out my free meditation guide at Goodwolf
dot me. Slash calm. In it, I walk you through
my process to engage with meditation in a new way,
and a lot of people have found it really helpful.
That's good, Wolf dot me slash calm. So I'm going
to start us in an unusual place. It's near the
(04:56):
end of your book. Can you describe having lime disease
and you describe going out and starting to surf, and
you describe starting to have these mystical experiences. I'm wondering
if you could share a little bit more about that,
and I'm kind of curious whether they've still continued for you.
And then I went to ground some of that back
(05:16):
into what the science tells us, because you've done a
great job of taking these mystical experiences and bringing them
back to some of why we think they might be occurring.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
So, as you pointed out, when I was about thirty,
I was very sick. I got lime disease, and I
spent the better portion of three years in bed, and
towards the end, I got dragged out to the Pacific
Ocean and put on a surfboard. And this was at
a time that I could barely walk across the room
and I could focus, think clear headed and pain free
(05:47):
and whatever, maybe twenty thirty minutes a day, and everything else.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Was just fuzzy and painful.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
And I was out there maybe thirty seconds in a
wave came and I literally probably took all the energy
I had left in the world on my board around
and I popped to my feet, and I popped into
a dimension of time I didn't even know existed.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Time seemed to slow down.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
I had a slid out of body experience where I
felt like I was hovering about my body and sort
of watching myself, but like I had panoramic vision.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
The most amazing part was that I.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Was clear headed, and I felt great, and I hadn't
felt even close vaguely normal for three years, so it
was astounding. And I felt so good that day, and
that experience was so wild that I ended up catching
four more waves. And then when that was over, I
was done, and I was exhausted, and my friends took
me home, put me in the bed, and they didn't
move again for about fourteen days. Fifteenth day walking in,
(06:38):
I caught a ride with my neighbor and I went
back to the beach and I did it again, and
the amazing thing is over. The course about six to
eight months, I wasn't went from about ten percent functional,
meaning like I was functional about ten percent of time,
to about eighty percent functional. And the only thing that
I was doing different in my life was going surfing
and having these quasimistical experiences in the way. So I
(07:00):
was obviously very very curious about what the hell was
going on, because surfing is not a known cure for
chronic autoimmune conditions, and I'm a rational materialist, I'm a
science guy. I don't have mystical experiences, and lime is
only fatal if it gets into your brain. So I
was pretty sure that the even though I was feeling better,
the reason I was having these quasimistical experiences is because
(07:24):
the disease had.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Gotten in my brain.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
And so I lived on a giant quest to figure
out what the heck was going on. And I very
quickly discovered that these quasimistic experiences I have names. We
call them flow states, and once you start to understand
the neurobiology of flow what's going on in the brain,
A lot of these so called mystical experiences that show
up with this state are obviously very explainable via biology.
(07:48):
But the second half of this question was am I
still having these experiences today? Am I still getting into
flow today?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Yes? I'm still getting into flow today.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
And so would you have described them as mystical then
because you didn't know what else to call them and
you weren't as experienced with being in flow?
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Well, time slows down. I had an out of body experience.
These are normally things that are classified as mystical experiences. Right,
time dilation now, but I didn't know at the time.
Is time dilation, which is the time has e strangely
speed upward, can slow down. That's actually a foundational property
of flow. It's one of the six psychological characteristics that
(08:24):
are used to describe this date. So some form of
time dilation, usually time speeds up right, you sit down
and write a quick email. It's so sucked into what
you're doing that an hour goes by, you look up
and you're like, where did time go? That's what happens
most of the time and flow. Occasionally, though, you get
that freeze from effect that happened to me in the waves,
or it's from your enemy's been in a car crash.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
So let's swing now all the way back around to
kind of the beginning of the book. The book is
called The Art of Impossible, and you describe two levels
of impossible. There's impossible, as in like somebody being able
to run the four minute mind, which was once thought
of as impossible. So that's one type. But you describe
another type of impossible that might apply to more of
(09:07):
the people listening than trying to break a record that's
never been broken as an example.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Well, I think it all applies to everybody. Let me
explain what I mean by that. I have spent my
career studying those moments in time when the impossible becomes possible.
I've done this in sports, I've done this in science
and technology and business culture.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
That's what I call capital I.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Impossible, doing that which has never been done. And what
you just mentioned is lowercase I incompossible. There's small I impossible,
which is essentially who I wrote the book for. Right
lessons learned from those people who have accomplished capital impossible.
It is for anybody who's going after lowercase I impossible, lowercase
I impossibles, those things we think are impossible for ourselves.
(09:53):
I'll give you a simple example from the book. I
grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the nineteen seventies. It
was a blue collar steel and I wanted to be
a writer. I mean I wanted to be a writer
from the time I was five or six years old.
I didn't know any writers. I know how you became
a writer. There was nowhe run around to ask. There
was no internet, there were no books to read. It
was a lowercase I impossible, meaning there is no clear
(10:15):
path from where I am to where I want to
get to and statistically not great odds of success. What
are other lowercase I impossibles that we all kind of are
more familiar with getting paid for what you love to do,
overcoming trauma, overcoming an addiction, becoming world class at anything
to do, becoming a successful entrepreneur or artist. I'm missing
(10:38):
it one obvious one that's eluding me that I like
to grab for.
Speaker 4 (10:42):
But I think it paint's a good picture.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
But I want to point out a couple of things,
just to frame this up so people understand something. When
we talk about peakuman performance, we're talking about nothing more
or less, I guess, than getting our biology to work
for us rether than against us. That's all that peakhuman
performance is.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
And what this means is If.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Your goal is capital ie impossible, that which has never
been done, well, that's the biology you're going to draw.
That's how you're going to do it. If your goal
is small eye impossible, well the biology is the same,
the tools are the same. In fact, if your goal
is man, small eye impossible, caw fuck that. I'm just
trying to get through Monday, right, like, it doesn't matter.
(11:22):
The biology is the same, The set of tools are
the same because evolutions shaped human beings and the work
that I do involves figuring out how to optimize that
biology and its scales. Meaning it's the same in everyone
or At the Flow Research Collective, we train on average
about a thousand people a month, and we train everybody
(11:43):
from kind of members of the US Special Forces and
professional athletes and c suite executive CEOs of major companies
all the way to like soccer moms from Ohio and
insurance workers from Indiana and you know, software coders from
Bangalore right becauseus the work that I do is built
on biology. The principles apply to everybody and anybody can
(12:05):
use them.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
In the book, you talk about biology scaling, but personality doesn't.
And so the principles that we're going to spend a
little bit of time talking about and as I mentioned
from the number of notes I took, we're going to
skim the very slightest surface of But the principles that
we're about to cover, you're saying are happening at the
level of biology, regardless of what our psychology might be.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Yes, personality, what your genetics are. Now, if you're not
six ' ten, you know you're impossible is to be
a center in the NBA and your four foot nine.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Okay, this is not.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
What we're talking about, right, Like you need a different Like, yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
You need a different book.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
I can't help you with the genetics part at all,
Like that's a different thing.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
But barring that, yes, biology scales.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
My work is centered on the state of performance known
as flow. Right, we talked about flow as well. I
was experiencing out in the waves. It is, as I
alluded to, it's defined as an optimal state of consciousness.
We refeel our best and we perform our best. More specifically,
it's any of those moments of rapt attention, total absorption.
You get so focused on what you're doing that everything
(13:15):
else just disappears. Right time, dilights as we talked about
your sense of self disappears, actual awareness will start to merge,
and all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go
through the roof. We could talk about how what through
the roof actually means huge boosts in motivation, grit, productivity, creativity, learning, empathy, perspectives.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
So a little bit of.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Strength, stamina, fast chatters, a couple other things. We can
talk about where the why later, But the point I
want to make is those are basically all the things
you want to accelerate for cognitive It's the whole suite,
it's all our tools, they're all amplified and flow. And
here's the kicker. Everybody's hardwired for floor flow. It's a
(13:59):
foundational part of being human. Evolution shaped every human being
to perform at their best in float. Flow is how
we do. How we're hardwired for pre performance. There are
other things going on during pre performance and other things
that lead to it, but flow is at the center
of it. And one of the most well established facts
in flow science is that the state is universal, shows
(14:19):
up in anyone anywhere, provided certain initial conditions are that
so everybody watching this, listening to this can get into flow,
and you can get this same boost and performance. So
for starters, that's one thing that we're talking about. When
you say biology scales.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
Excellent, and you've written about flow elsewhere, it's been part
of your writing for a while now, and so you
say that this book expands upon that. Right, It certainly
talks about we need flow, but we also have to
train up some of the other skills like motivation, learning,
and creativity. So a lot of the book is really
(14:57):
talking about how we increase our motivation, are learning, and
how we increase our creativity. So talk about how flow
ties together with those three things.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
So, as I said, peak performance is getting our biology
to work for us right then against us?
Speaker 2 (15:13):
What is that biology?
Speaker 1 (15:15):
What are the sets of skills being amplified motivation, learning, creativity,
and flow? That is what we mean by cognitive peak performance.
The way to think about this is, in any situation,
any challenge, motivation is what gets you into the game.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Learning is what allows you to continue to play, especially if.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
You're going after like high hard goals that are that
are complicated, you don't quite not get there. Creativity is
how you steer right, creat problem solvings how you steer,
and flow is how you sort of turbo boast, all
those things sort of beyond reason with expectations. But you
asked a sort of different question, which is sort of
where I got stuck thinking about, like which way to
frame this? How they relate is interesting. So, as you
(15:55):
pointed out, I've been doing this a long time. I've
been training people in flow for years and years and years.
I think I've probably spoken to or trained a quarter
million people. Is I guess my staff has come up with.
I don't know if it's right or not, but somewhere
around there it's a lot of people. And what we've
learned about flow over the past ten to fifteen years
(16:16):
is more about the neurobiology flow, what's going on in
the brain and the body when we're in this state.
And psychology is useful, but it's often metaphor. Neurobiology is mechanism.
So if you want to make something reliable and repeatable,
you want mechanism. So that is what has happened. We've
gotten very good at training flow. And when I say
(16:38):
very good, I said that at the Flow Research Collective
we train about a thousand people a month. We measure
flow with the standard psychological instrument pre and POST, and
we see about a seventy percent boost in flow consistently
back end of our trainings, butt and button is how
everything is related. What we used to see is you
(16:59):
get this big burst and flow because it turns out
this is easy to train, and then there'd be this
spectacular return to baseline, like they'd get a ton of flow,
and then it would just like it's somebody turned off
the flow tap and flow is one of the most pleasurable, addictive, meaningful,
life affirming experiences we can possibly have. And you give
(17:19):
people a whole lot more of that and then you
take it away or it stops showing up. You have
very pissed off people. And we had very pissed off people,
and so spent a really long time trying to figure
out what the hell's going wrong? What is and what
we realized is problem wasn't flow. It was that all
the stuff that flow amplifies, but specifically motivation, learning and creativity,
(17:40):
if you hadn't trained those things up at alongside flow,
you couldn't keep pace with the acceleration that the state provided.
And worse, when psychologists and researchers talking about motivation, the
term is technically defined as the energy for action but
what they really mean as a whole bunch just motivation
is that catch all term for external motivation or extrinsic motivation,
(18:05):
So like money, sex, fame, things in the world that
we want intrinsic motivation, internal motivators like curiosity or passion
or purpose. We're also talking about goal setting and grit
and if you haven't done really good grit work right,
flows this enormously pleasurable experience, but it doesn't last forever.
And if you haven't done the good selling gridwork, there
(18:26):
are going to be days where there's no flow the
right and it's just hard work, hard slogging. And if
you haven't done the work to develop really good grit skills,
those days are going to be very, very difficult. They
get a little easier because of flow, and we know
that flow massively amplifies grit. But some people have this
problem when they do this flow work, where they start
(18:47):
to feel that it's a bliss chunkie problem. Flow is
so addictively pleasurable, right, they're like, oh, dude, everything's got
to feel this good. This is how life's supposed to feel. Well, No, no,
it's not. And there's times when you can't get into
flow or you haven't. On the really hardcore grit work,
you can't sustain the flow. It's not simple, but important.
Speaker 4 (19:06):
I think, yep, absolutely, that really covered it. And I
think you make that point a bunch of times, and
I think it's an important one that on our way
to impossible, flow is an absolute.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Booster, necessary but not sufficient, yep.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
And that it feels really good. But along the way
to impossible there's going to be a lot of feeling
not very good also. And if all we're thinking about
is oh, we, like you said, I should be feeling flow,
I should be feeling good. This should always be wonderful,
we won't have what it takes to keep going all
the way too impossible, because there are times it's not easy.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
The way I put it in the book, I think
more meaningful does not always mean more pleasant, and that
is very very true. In fact, interestingly, when positive psychologists
talk about happiness these days, there's three levels of happiness
available on the planet. The first level is happy as
how do you feel right here, right now. There's not
a whole lot you can do about that level. Right
(20:02):
you can make yourself, as Dan Harris said, ten percent
happier gratitude practice is mindfulness practices, regular acts. There's stuff
you can do, but because of how emotional set points work,
those points are set up usually about ten eleven years old,
and this is the worst we're going to feel and
is the best we're going to feel in our lives
going to take place pretty much in the middle, and
barring chronic unemployment or the death of a child. On
the low end, that's the low end, it doesn't move.
(20:24):
It's pretty set. High end can move with constant supposures
that flow, but as general, it doesn't. In other words,
you can get ten percent happy, that's about it. And
flow is no guarantee that you're going to be happier
because flow takes place when we're pushing on our skills
to the utmost. So usually when we're doing that, we're uncomfortable.
And if you're really a peak performer, you're going to
(20:45):
be uncomfortable all the time, right, because you're always sort
of trying to push on your skills and be a
little better and be a little better. You get very
good at being uncomfortable, comfortable being uncomfortable, but moment to
moment happiness probably doesn't move much. The next two levels
of happiness available to even being. The second level is
a high flow lifestyle, right. It's a lifestyle in which
(21:07):
you get regular access to flow. This could be doesn't
matter what you do. Maybe what you do doesn't produce
a lot of flow. I live in how and all
around me there's tons of people who work whatever job
they can get in the summer so they can ski
all winter. That's a high flow lifestyle, right. The best
we get to feel the planet is a high flow
lifestyle where the thing that is giving us the most
(21:30):
flow is coupled to our purpose. And you know, as
a guy who my wife and I ran an animal sanctuary,
I'm kind of in a very very very poor rural
county for a very very long time with a lot
of animal cruelty. That's a very high flow lifestyle with
a lot of purpose. It was also pretty miserable, grueling,
(21:50):
difficult work. It produced a lot of flow along the
way and a lot of meaning. My point is that
that kind of work produces deep meaning, deep contentment, deep
you piece even but happiness that means just a thin drug. Ultimately,
that's I think what you start to discover overview.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
It's not that you don't want to be happy.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
It's that it's a thin drug and there are much
better drugs.
Speaker 4 (22:13):
Out there right right, and often aiming right at happiness
as that being the goal is particularly counterproductive.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Oh yeah, it's a good way to miss it. Yeah,
it's a good way to miss it.
Speaker 4 (22:42):
So what I'm going to do from here is we're
just going to skip through a few different parts of
the book and hit some different things that bring together
some of these different components of motivation, learning, and curiosity.
So I want to talk about motivation for a minute,
because you talk about there being a stack that's really
important in the drive part of motivation, which we would
(23:05):
think of is the way most people typically think of
motivation as I feel like doing something right, I have
the energy to want to do something. And you mentioned
that there are really five things that make up this
drive stack. You talk about curiosity, passion, purpose, and then
autonomy and mastery after those, I'm wondering if we could
(23:27):
talk a little bit about curiosity, because the way that
you laid out for people to find some of their
curiosity I really loved. I really liked some of the
exercises that were there, and so I was wondering if
you could walk us through briefly the basic exercise and
how somebody can start to find maybe what their curiosity is.
(23:48):
I hear this up from a lot of people. I
don't quite know what it is. How you cultivate a
passion by sort of going through the gate of curiosity,
I guess would be the better way to say it.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
So, as you pointed out, there are a bunch of
intrinsic motivators. There are way more than the five you
mentioned curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, master but those tend in
the science to be the biggest five. Right. You could
listen intrinsic motivators forever, but those are the biggest five.
And what the research shows is that if you want
more motivation in your life, you actually start with extrinsic motivators.
(24:19):
You've got to start like with you need enough money
in a sense to take care of basic safety and
security needs. You have to deal with safety and security first.
Now it's a little bit. What the research shows is
you basically have to be able to pay all your
bills and have a little left over for discretionary spending
(24:40):
a little, it's not a whole lot. Once that's in place,
if you want more motivation, more productivity, more energy for action.
Turns out, it's not that we stop wanting things like money,
sex and fame. We still want them, but as a
driver of performance and productivity, they're not as powerful as into.
Ternal motivators are intrinsic drivers, and there's five of them,
(25:03):
as you pointed out, curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and master
These are the big five. And what you notice among
peak performers everywhere is much in the way that you
like anybody. An athlete will like stack fuel sources, meaning
they're always going to.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Hydrate super well.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
They're going to make sure they have enough protein and
carbs and fats and blah blah blah right and the
right nutrition and the right supplements and the right everything.
You also want to stack internal fuel sources. It's hard
to do anything in this world, and it's hard to
go after anything high hard goals. You need as many
of internal fuel sources as you possibly can get. In
(25:41):
other words, you want all your intrinsic motivators, your big
five aligned in point in the same direction. And they're
actually built that way. They're built to come online in
a certain order and to point us in direction. And
as you pointed out the most foundational human motivators curiosity.
So whether what's the big deal about intrinsic motivators, Like,
(26:03):
why do we even care? Why are we having this conversation?
Intrinsic motivators give us focus for free. That's the really
big deal. Your brain takes about twenty five percent of
your energy at rest, and it gets two percent of
your body weight. It's a giant energy hat, right, and
focus is a huge, huge, huge caloric energy expense.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
You're curious about it.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
You're paying attention without working too hard or at all.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Now, Curiosity, as you alluded to, is designed biologically to
be built into passion. When people say passion, what that
looks like biologically is often just the intersection of multiple curiosities.
The way to think about this is like, maybe you're
interested in football and you're interested in nutrition.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Now, each of.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Those on their own, they may not have enough energy
kind of be a lifelong passion something you're going to
spend your whole life, you know, totally paying attention to
all the time. But if you can figure out where
three or four year curiosities intersect and get a couple
of easy wins, there and get some other things going
on that I talk about in The Art Impossible. That's
(27:21):
sort of the ingredient for passion. Now, if anybody wants
to know how to do this, yes, you can read
The Art Impossible, but I can make it easier on
you. You can go to www. Thepassion recipe dot com, which
is we basically took these chapters because this was so
important to so many people, and we turn it into
an interactive workbook.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
It's free.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
You just put it online for people the Passion recipe
dot com. It teaches you how to cultivate and turn
curiosity into passion and turn passion into purpose. So if
you want to cultivate curiosity, you really just want to
start with twenty five things you're interested in it. And
all I mean by interested it is a free weekend.
(28:01):
You would maybe want to spend it watching a couple
movies about the subject, or reading a book, or having
a conversation or two with an expert. Right, that's what
I mean interested. Make a list of twenty five things
you're interested in. The key here is try to be
as specific as possible. Right, don't be interested in football,
be interested in the past, blocking mechanics, required to play
(28:24):
left tackle as precise as you possibly can be.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Right.
Speaker 4 (28:28):
I loved your punk rock analogy. You got to give
the if you remember, Oh yeah, don't be interested in
punk rock.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Right, don't be interested in punk rock. Be interested. I
think it was the evolution of political punk from Crass
to Rise Against. Had an old girlfriend who lived in
the original Crass commune, And I don't know. I'm just
a huge rise Against fan. I guess, but which is true?
Speaker 4 (28:51):
Do you love Against Me?
Speaker 1 (28:53):
I do love Against Me? They got a little more melodic.
I really like early Against Me. It's a little too
poppy for me, Like it's not quite as punk as
they were, and I like the older punk better. But
I really do like Against Me a lot. They've got
a handful of my absolute favorite punk songs ever, Miami Baby,
(29:15):
I'm an Anarchist.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
Yeah, they're live record that they put out.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Oh I love it.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
I don't know if you've yea love it.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
It's so good.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
The live version of the lyric is Condoli is Yeah,
what the hell? From her Lips to God's Ears? I
think that's the name of the song, From Her Lips
to God's Ears. The live version of that is really good. Yeah,
and Potatoes, Rice and Beans live is really good on
that album as well.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
They're an amazing live band. So we've derailed ourselves now.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
But back to punk is something. Now you got my attention.
Speaker 4 (29:46):
Maybe we'll see if we lead back around to it.
So we're making a list of twenty five things.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Yeah, twenty five things you're interested in, and then you
just want to look for places they intersect. So you know,
I said, let's say nutrition is also on your list.
Again too vague, right, you're interested in the past blocking
mechanics to play left tackle, and nutrition is too vague,
But maybe you're The example I give in the book
is insects as a few food source, right, So where
(30:13):
could they possibly intersect? Well, it requires a lot of
calories to play left tackle, right, would insects make a
good football food? That's an intersection? And all I say
is when you find those intersections, play there for a while.
Just play there, go there, hang out, spend ten minutes
twenty minutes a day, do this over months and months
(30:34):
and months. Test out those intersections. See which ones are
really sticky and grabby for you, or there's a lot
of energy. But if you can figure out where three
or four of your curiosities intersect and start playing there
and learning stuff and getting some easy wins along the way.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
That's how we build passion.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
A couple things that are worth pointing out, though, because
people have this problem when they start cultivating passion, is
they think about passion. I say, you know, give me
an example of athletic pass You get like Lebron James
coming in for the dunk, you know, with a skowl
on his face and the finals, right, And yes, you
are right, that is passion. But that is late stage passion.
(31:12):
That is not what early stage passion looks like or
feels like. Early stage passion is just a little kid
standing in a driveway trying to get a basketball to drop.
And it feels like that on the inside, right, it
feels more like curiosity and little successes than like this burning,
(31:33):
consuming thing that you think if you expect to this
like giant burning fire all at once, it's not going
to be there. And the other thing is you don't
want it there right away. What you want to do
is slowly cultivate your passion and make sure you've got
it right, because you don't want to be a couple
of years into this is my passion to discover Oh shit,
(31:53):
it was only a phase, right. I don't actually want
to spend the next two years on an archaeological dig
in the deserts of Egypt, because no, it turns out
it was a phase. Right, Like when you come to
that point, if you screw it up, it's really demotivating.
So on the front end, you want to go slowly here.
This is not one of those things in peak performance.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Everybody can do this.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Everybody can figure out align their curiosities, build them into passion,
build passion and a purpose. We're all biologically hardwired for it.
We all can do it. But you want to do
it slowly, and you don't want to be in a
rush in this case, right. A lot of people are
really impatient to be there already and get it, And
here you really don't. The system, the biology is designed
(32:38):
for this to be cultivated over time, and you don't
want to make an error on this one. This is
one of those places where you've got to go slow.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
To go fast. All right.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
Now, let's pause for a quick good wolf reminder, and
this one is on meditation. If while you're meditating your
mind wanders, you probably, like most people treat that as
a moment of failure, like ough, my mind wandered again.
But let's flip that and instead treat that as a
moment of celebration because in that moment, your mind actually
(33:07):
woke up and you were mindful of the fact that
your mind wandered. So it's a win. So if we
can flip that right on its head and say, oh,
good job, brain, we actually make it more likely that
a our brain is going to do it more often
because we're training it, and b that we're going to
enjoy it more. And specifically, it's about how to make
you not dread meditation so much and actually find it relaxing.
(33:31):
Check out my free meditation guide at Goodwolf dot me
slash calm. If you say in the book, you know,
we often think of, like you said, passion, get obsessed,
stay obsessed, and you say, you know, let's start with
get curious, Stay curious. All right, I'm going to jump
right out of that section, even though we could go
from there into how to turn that passion into a
(33:52):
purpose and you know, autonomy and mastery in that area.
But I want to move into a little bit about
grit and I want to talk about the idea of
learning to work with our thoughts as part of grit.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Oh yeah, that's really key.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
So place to start, I guess is that when psychologists
define grit, they often define it using Angela Duckworth's definition
as the intersection of passion and perseverance. And I love
Angela's work. She's an exceptionally bright woman. She's done exceptionally
great research. But when you talk to peak performers about grit,
(34:32):
they actually say, hey, wait a minute. They train six
different kinds of grit skills and all sort of require
different techniques, and in the end they sort of all
will boil down to the same thing, but you have
to train them independently for a while. The first is
the perseverance, the grit we're all familiar with, right, kick
me in the teeth, punch me in that God doesn't matter,
(34:52):
I'm still coming. And that's the first level of grit
is often and by the way, it's if you want
to train that level of grit, that level of you
want to start physically. The research says, even if you
want to train it cognitively, which is this question that
you asked about, and we're going to get there. The
place to start is physically and by perseverance. If you
(35:13):
work out, you go to the gym and you normally
do three sets of ten when you bench press. Next time,
do two sets of ten and one set of eleven,
very very slowly. You just want to push outside your
comfort zone a little bit at a time, over and
over and over again. And here's the key, especially on
perseverance side, because this is this is tricky and people
miss this a lot. It's not enough to put in
(35:37):
the hard work to get grittier. You have to notice.
So you have to in other words, you got it. Yes,
you got to show up and do that next eleventh
eleventh rep you know, every time you work.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Out, just for the next month.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
But you also got to remember at the end of
the month to look back and go, wow, the entire
time every time I had to do that eleventh breath,
I got it. I'm tough enough to do that. You've
got to remember to notice that you're developing grit along
the way, which is really important because you have to
trust that grit for it to really make a difference
in your life. You need to be able to know
that you go into the situation and you're actually grittier, right,
(36:13):
Like you can handle a little bit more, which is
why we want to do this for a long period time,
and we want to pay attention to it. Once you've
sort of become a little physically grittier, the next thing
to pay attention to if you're interested in pea performance,
if you're interested in getting through tomorrow, I think, is
the grit to control your thoughts. Right, You've got to
pay attention to what's going on up here, because you know,
(36:37):
if you're anything like me, it's bad upstairs a lot
of the time, right, And so if I'm not kind
of paying attention to what's going on in my head,
it can often swallow me. There's a number of different
ways to sort of tune your thoughts and work with
this particular problem. Gratitude less or mindfulness work meditation. These
(37:02):
are two really, really great methods. There's a lot of
other stuff you can do. If you're more kind of
kinesthetically oriented like me, you may prefer yoga to just
straight up meditation because there's some movement involved. But there's
a lot of different ways to sort of get some
space between kind of thought and emotion. There's a gap
(37:22):
between thought and emotion. What you want to try to
do is like stretch it out so that when the
thought pops up, before you get super angry and totally
lose your temper at your wife or spouse or husband
or whomever, you have a second to get in there
and be like, who wha whoa?
Speaker 2 (37:38):
Right?
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Really sure this is the reaction you want?
Speaker 4 (38:01):
You bring up a couple different things here. One is
this idea of using the phrase control in our thoughts,
which you then later sort of say, well, that's a
little bit of a misnomer, right. Any of us who
have sat down to meditate know the initial sort of
launch of a thought into our brain is not really
a controllable phenomenon. What comes up is what comes up.
It's really what we do after that. And I love
(38:24):
that you talk about the self talk. You say self
talk's really important.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
Here.
Speaker 4 (38:28):
There's a quote in here from Michael Gervais that I
absolutely love, and listeners will have heard me talk about
this a lot, and he says that there's only two
kinds of thoughts, those that constrict us or those that
expand us. And I think that is such a powerful idea.
You know, even when decision making is this decision going
to make me bigger or smaller? Is it going to
expand me or contract me? That core idea is so powerful.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
I think so too. Well.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
What I like about it is for me. When Mike
first said it to me, I thought about, well, you
know what thoughts that create more space feel like internally right,
and so that I was like, Oh, this is totally
applicable because I know what this feels like, so I
can steer from this right off the bat.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
Mike's very very good at that.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
At coming up with performance tools where you're like, oh,
I like, not only do I know what you mean,
I know what it feels like.
Speaker 4 (39:19):
That's why I love it too. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
Yeah, So I'll tell you something funny about this. This
is not exactly in the art impossible. We were having
this conversation on this phrase. So I was skiing week
and a half ago, one of the biggest lines I've
ever skied of my life, and there's one hundred foot
straight line at the end of it, which means you
don't get to.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Turn for one hundred feet.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
You just like you pin between two rock walls and
you just have to hold keep it together until you
get to the exit or you'll die and it's terrifying.
And I got into the straight line and my right
ski hit a bunch of ice icicles actually that were
fallen off the trees and into the run and it
(40:00):
was like my race ski was bouncing on marbles and
the guy was Schema said later it looked like I
started to tip forward and like I was going to somersault,
which would have put me in the hospital easy, possibly worse.
And my internal experience, the way I described it to afterwards,
like my brain found another gear, which I appropriately referred
(40:20):
to as fuck this, I'm not dying now, right, But
I like, I got incredibly angry in the moment, like
in rage, and I get what what he said is
is just look like I sat back up and shot
out of there, and I remember nothing at other than
just being like, wow, this is that feeling that precedes
(40:42):
the I'm falling now, which precedes the i'mgoing to the
hospital now.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
And I was like, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Like no, and I got super angry. And what was interesting,
and this is why I'm bringing this up, is we
were talking about that experience in the context of Mike's quote,
because you would not inspect like anger to be a
thought that creates space, but in this particular case, this
(41:07):
particular context.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
It was the only tool. Right.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
If I wouldn't have grabbed for something that would have
given me a lot of testosterone and adrenaline at that moment,
I had to fight against gravity, right, like iscles stripped beforeward,
which is really interesting. And we were talking about how
sometimes thoughts that create space are not going to be
the obvious ones sometimes. That was what the conversation was,
and I thought it was an interesting subtle point in
(41:31):
one I hadn't thought about before.
Speaker 4 (41:33):
Yeah, that's a great story. We're nearing the end of
our time. But let's hopscotch ahead in the book here,
and I want to talk about another part that I
absolutely loved, which was the five Steps to Learn Anything.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Wait wait, wait, wait wait, you left out the most
important part of that title, the five steps to learn
anything before you have a public opinion on it. Five
not so easy steps to learn anything.
Speaker 4 (41:58):
Yes, you're right, so easy steps. Yes, I better add
that to my outline. And you sort of talk about
the other part of it that I loved is you're like,
before I'm going to have a public opinion about something,
I'm going to have gone through those, and I remember thinking, boy,
that would be refreshing for the world for more people
to think, Well, before I'm going to have an opinion
(42:20):
on that, I'm going to go.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Through these five steps.
Speaker 4 (42:25):
It was really practical, and it really sort of dovetailed
in some ways with my experience of learning things. And
there were some subtleties that I had not thought of
before that I think will help me in the future.
So let's just kind of go through them relatively quickly.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
There's a lot of detail in there, but here's the
big idea. What's worth knowing is learning works a certain
way in the brain. We're designed to learn in a
certain way, and if you can sort of do that
and harness that, you can get a lot farther faster.
So in the five not Sueazy steps, basically a lesson
in how to read and how to learn from. This
(43:02):
is about knowledge acquisition, not skills acquisitions. So this is
about how do you learn a subject. It's going to
involve reading. And what I want to talk about now
is what do you pay attention to?
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Will you read?
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Because it's from a neurobiological standpoint, it's not what you
think it is, And it's much more interesting when you
actually know how the brain work is designed to work,
makes it so much easier. So the things that I
talk about paying attention to when you're reading, when you're
trying to learn, because it's not what you did in
high school or what you did in school, right, it's
almost the exact opposite one. Your brain loves narrative. Your
(43:34):
brain does cause and effect all the time. Right, this
caused this?
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Why?
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Because we want to know that. We want to know
how to create our future. Right, we want to know
if this causes this, I know how to get that,
I know how to intervene. I know how it works.
That's what a narrative is. That's what a story is.
This happened first, This happens, This happened third. Right, So
when you're reading, one of the first things we want
to pay attention to a little bit is history, the
history of a subject. First, stop being intimidated by subjects.
(44:02):
Just realize that any intellectual subject, whatever it is, it's
just a voyage of discovery.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Somebody had a question, they answered that question.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
It led to another question, and somebody had another question
and they answered that one.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
On the right. That's the voyage of discovery.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
That is any subject and it's a narrative, and so
just pay a little bit of attention to the order.
The narrative is the big Christmas tree. If you give
your brain the big Christmas tree, when the individual facts
show up ornaments, you'll have an easier time remembering them
because your brain is going to be like, oh, this happened.
I put this fact right there. It slots in. This
(44:38):
is something your brain naturally does, so you're just taking
advantage of kind of your own basic software there. The
second thing you want to pay attention to is terminology jargon.
And what I mean by that is and I will
be the first person to like, I have a flat
rule in my company and by my life. If somebody
needs a lot of big words to explain it, they're
(45:00):
probably lying. Something I learned as a journalist, right For
years and years and years, I've met the smartest people
on the planet, and most of them can explain their
thing to you as.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
If you were five years old.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
It's always the folks who don't quite know what they're
talking about that make it really fancy. In my opinion,
that said jargon, while super annoying, tends to be annoyingly
precise and technical language often contains most of a subject.
So when people talk about I need to learn a
new subject, a large chunk of what they're actually saying
(45:33):
is you need to learn vocabulary.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
So the way I do it is, when.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
I'm reading one of these books, if I'm getting fancy
language showed up that I don't understand. First time I
see the word, I ignored. The second time I see
the word I ignored. If I see a technical word
that's three, three or four times in the book, I
look it up, and then every time I see it
from that point on, I just say the definitional out
loud right instead of reading the word, I read the
definition until it starts to stick. And the reason is
(45:59):
just by learning those definitions, you start to learn huge, huge,
massive amounts about the subject, and then you have the
overarching history. But here's the most important thing, and this
is the secret to learning. When you're read in a book,
pay attention to what I call your emotional wows, those
curiosity moments where you go, what the hell are that's
(46:20):
so cool and its ideas start firing. The reason is
this curiosity is neurobiologically a little bit of dopamine and
a little bit of aura up and effort. Those are
the two neurochemicals that appear in the brain that help
produce the sensation of curiosity. But they do something else.
They prime learning. When they're in our brain, we have
(46:42):
a much easier time remembering what we're learning. So write
down this is what The only thing I really take
notes on when I read are my emotional wows. Oh.
On page seventy seven, here's this really cool idea about
pattern recognition and the brain, and it reminds me of
blob blah blah. I follow my curiosity that way, I
(47:04):
remember it. I follow my brain through a subject as
long as you follow your curiosity through a subject. Now,
by the way, this is not how you master a
subject to pass a test in college. This is not
going to help you there. This is like actual, real, practical,
real world applicable knowledge that you can do shit with
passing a test. You have requirements for that test. This
(47:27):
will help. But if you're reading Ethan Frome in college
and they're going to ask you, you may want to
write down more than just the emotional wows.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
Okay, so caveat there.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
But this will really really help because by following our curiosity,
We're following our natural learning software. That's how I do it.
The other thing that I always point out to people
because people make this mistake. I don't know if it's
that we were taught this in school or we just
assume this because it seems like Cummings says, don't always
need to understand everything. Learning means being uncertain. The internal
(48:01):
experience of learning for everyone, everybody in the world is.
Speaker 2 (48:05):
I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
Oh look I don't suck anymore, right, that's the experience
of it. In fact, my buddy Andrew Youuman is a
Stanford neuroscientist, we do a lot of work with. He says,
you know, he does a lot of work with the
Navy Seals, and he says, you know, one of the
things that peak performers, especially a speck ops guys, know
that everybody else doesn't is that peak performance it's always crawl, walk, run,
(48:30):
And the biggest difference is between peak performers and everybody else,
is that peak performers know this, and everybody else show
up and they're like, dude, man, I don't crawl. I
don't even walk. I'm going to figure out what the
shortcut is. I'm going to start by a jog, right,
And peak performers show up and they're like, you know what, Okay,
I got to crawl. Then I'm gonna walk, and then
maybe I'll run. And it's gonna suck. I suck, I suck,
(48:51):
I suck, I suck, and there's nothing to do but
to do it. And it's funny because you see these
top performers and we often think, oh my god, there's
so far ahead of the of us.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
How did they get there.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
One of the main ways they got there is every
time they're faced with the challenge, they know it's going
to suck, and they just don't care.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
They just lean right in.
Speaker 1 (49:10):
The rest of us when face for the challenge, we
dither around for a while. We're eventually going to rise
to the challenge and do the thing. You've got to
get it done, sooner or later.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
You got to.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
But most of us are like, oh, really, let me
call my brother and Tello about all the shit.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
I got it.
Speaker 1 (49:27):
You know, we do all that, but peak performers just like, nope,
crawl walk round.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
I'm just going to lean in immediately.
Speaker 4 (49:33):
That's great, So listener in thinking about all of that
and the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you
were going to isolate just one top insight or thing
to do that you're taking away, what would it be?
Remember that, little by little, a little becomes a lot,
and a habit for me that has a crude and
benefit over time is meditation. However, one of the things
(49:54):
that gets in our way of building a steady meditation
practice is that very striving. Right. Of course, course we're
doing it because we want certain benefits, but in the
moment of actually meditating, we need to let striving go
and focus on just being there and experiencing it no
matter what's happening. It becomes not enjoyable because I'm trying
(50:15):
to make something happen some special moment. We want to
let go of that. So if you want to stop
dreading meditation and actually find it enjoyable, check out my
free meditation guide at Goodwolf dot me slash Calm. I
think what you just said there is a great place
for us to wrap up the conversation, which is really
that idea of crawl, walk run. I talk about it
(50:36):
all the time on the show. We just talk about
this idea of you know, sometime we've got to be
willing to take baby steps. We've got to start where
we are and move through the progression.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
I gotta tell you something.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
I think it's all baby steps, but you've just got
to be willing to continue to take baby steps. One
of the things I tell people this isn't a one
hundred percent drew, but as a general rule, because of
emotional set points, if you've sort of survive being a teenager,
you've already felt just about the worst that life can
(51:06):
offer you. I'm not saying you can't have that bad
feeling for days and days and weeks and months on ends,
you know what I mean, But emostion those set points
are sort of set up by around you know, ten
or eleven or twelve, by like bad experiences, good experiences,
and most of life takes place in between. And then
you get teenagers where your hormones are raging and you
have no control of your emotions. So honestly, again, as
(51:29):
I said earlier, unless there's the death of a child,
the chronic unemployment, which can change this, as a general rule,
if you've survived being a teenager, you've suffered the worst
that you're going to suffer on any peak performerce Path
taking those baby steps, which is a strange thing to realize,
but it seems to be biologically true.
Speaker 4 (51:48):
Awesome, Well, Stephen, thank you so much. I found the
book absolutely fascinating, and as I said, I took so
many notes my curiosity points of things that jumped off
the page, because that's the way I prepare for these interviews.
What excited me, There were a ton of them.
Speaker 2 (52:01):
Well, thank you, I appreciate that.
Speaker 4 (52:04):
Thanks so much for taking the time to come on
the show. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
Well my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (52:08):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (52:24):
If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
consider making a monthly donation to support the One you
Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this
monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits.
It's our way of saying thank you for your support.
Speaker 4 (52:40):
Now.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
We are so grateful for the members of our community.
We wouldn't be able to do what we do without
their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted.
To learn more, make a donation at any level and
become a member of the one you Feed community, go
to oneufeed dot net, slash join the One You Feed
podcast would like to say sincerely thank our sponsors for
(53:02):
supporting the show.
The internal experience of learning for everyone, everybody in the world.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Is I suck. I suck, I suck, suck, I suck.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Oh look, I don't suck anymore.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
(00:38):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. We
(01:12):
hope you'll enjoy this episode from the archive. Thanks for
joining us. Our guest on this episode is Stephen Kotler,
a New York Times bestselling author, award winning journalist, and
the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. Stephen is
one of the world's leading experts on human performance. He's
the author of thirteen books, nine of them best sellers,
(01:33):
including the Art of Impossible, A Peak Performance Primer.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
Hi Steven, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Good to be with you, Eric.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
Your book is called The Art of Impossible, A Peak
Performance Primer. And as I was telling you before the show,
I have taken perhaps as many notes on this book
as any I have read. So we've got a lot
of different ways we could take this conversation. But before
we get into it, we'll start, like we always do,
with a parable. There is a grandfather who talking with
his grandson in life, and he says, there's two wolves
(02:03):
inside of us that are always at battle. What is
a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
(02:24):
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
I don't know what it means to you in my
life for my work, but I can tell you what
it reminds me of, which is one of the really
sort of strange and interesting things about human biology and
unan performance is the system. Meaning our biology is designed
in a very weird way at every level to go
(02:51):
where you look, where you put your attention is where
you end up. And this is very very clear in
action sports, where I've done a lot of research where
if you want to, for example, surf a tube, everything
that has to take place in that tube takes place
basically too fast for you to react. All you can
really do is put your eyes on the end of
the tube and you go there. When you want to ski,
(03:13):
you're really hard, straight behind right, you get to the
point where you put your eyes on the exit and
you go there. We're goal directed machines on the internally,
and what that essentially means is we don't live in reality.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
We live in a.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
World that's shaped predominantly by our fears and our goals,
and in a sense, on an internal level, with those goals,
the way sort of consciousness of our biology is designed
to work.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Once again, you go.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Where you look, you go where you put your attention,
So I guess in a sense it depends on which
one you feed. Is roughly the same as a neurobiological principle,
which essentially, we go where we look, we go, we
put our attention.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Listener,
while you were listening to that, what resonated with you?
What one thing to feed your good Wolf comes to mind?
If the thing that came to your mind was more
time for stillness, or you've tried meditation before and you
really haven't liked it, then I want to give you
a quick tip that might make it better for you.
And it's simply to stop expecting that you're not going
(04:12):
to have thoughts. Nearly everyone has this expectation that they're
going to sit down and meditate and they're going to
stop having thoughts. And when they stop having thoughts, that
means they're doing it well. But no one does that,
and so we end up feeling like we're failing all
of the time. Every three seconds, failed again, failed again.
We develop a relationship with meditation that is aversive. So
(04:35):
if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find
it relaxing, check out my free meditation guide at Goodwolf
dot me. Slash calm. In it, I walk you through
my process to engage with meditation in a new way,
and a lot of people have found it really helpful.
That's good, Wolf dot me slash calm. So I'm going
to start us in an unusual place. It's near the
(04:56):
end of your book. Can you describe having lime disease
and you describe going out and starting to surf, and
you describe starting to have these mystical experiences. I'm wondering
if you could share a little bit more about that,
and I'm kind of curious whether they've still continued for you.
And then I went to ground some of that back
(05:16):
into what the science tells us, because you've done a
great job of taking these mystical experiences and bringing them
back to some of why we think they might be occurring.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
So, as you pointed out, when I was about thirty,
I was very sick. I got lime disease, and I
spent the better portion of three years in bed, and
towards the end, I got dragged out to the Pacific
Ocean and put on a surfboard. And this was at
a time that I could barely walk across the room
and I could focus, think clear headed and pain free
(05:47):
and whatever, maybe twenty thirty minutes a day, and everything else.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Was just fuzzy and painful.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
And I was out there maybe thirty seconds in a
wave came and I literally probably took all the energy
I had left in the world on my board around
and I popped to my feet, and I popped into
a dimension of time I didn't even know existed.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Time seemed to slow down.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
I had a slid out of body experience where I
felt like I was hovering about my body and sort
of watching myself, but like I had panoramic vision.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
The most amazing part was that I.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Was clear headed, and I felt great, and I hadn't
felt even close vaguely normal for three years, so it
was astounding. And I felt so good that day, and
that experience was so wild that I ended up catching
four more waves. And then when that was over, I
was done, and I was exhausted, and my friends took
me home, put me in the bed, and they didn't
move again for about fourteen days. Fifteenth day walking in,
(06:38):
I caught a ride with my neighbor and I went
back to the beach and I did it again, and
the amazing thing is over. The course about six to
eight months, I wasn't went from about ten percent functional,
meaning like I was functional about ten percent of time,
to about eighty percent functional. And the only thing that
I was doing different in my life was going surfing
and having these quasimistical experiences in the way. So I
(07:00):
was obviously very very curious about what the hell was
going on, because surfing is not a known cure for
chronic autoimmune conditions, and I'm a rational materialist, I'm a
science guy. I don't have mystical experiences, and lime is
only fatal if it gets into your brain. So I
was pretty sure that the even though I was feeling better,
the reason I was having these quasimistical experiences is because
(07:24):
the disease had.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Gotten in my brain.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
And so I lived on a giant quest to figure
out what the heck was going on. And I very
quickly discovered that these quasimistic experiences I have names. We
call them flow states, and once you start to understand
the neurobiology of flow what's going on in the brain,
A lot of these so called mystical experiences that show
up with this state are obviously very explainable via biology.
(07:48):
But the second half of this question was am I
still having these experiences today? Am I still getting into
flow today?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Yes? I'm still getting into flow today.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
And so would you have described them as mystical then
because you didn't know what else to call them and
you weren't as experienced with being in flow?
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Well, time slows down. I had an out of body experience.
These are normally things that are classified as mystical experiences. Right,
time dilation now, but I didn't know at the time.
Is time dilation, which is the time has e strangely
speed upward, can slow down. That's actually a foundational property
of flow. It's one of the six psychological characteristics that
(08:24):
are used to describe this date. So some form of
time dilation, usually time speeds up right, you sit down
and write a quick email. It's so sucked into what
you're doing that an hour goes by, you look up
and you're like, where did time go? That's what happens
most of the time and flow. Occasionally, though, you get
that freeze from effect that happened to me in the waves,
or it's from your enemy's been in a car crash.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
So let's swing now all the way back around to
kind of the beginning of the book. The book is
called The Art of Impossible, and you describe two levels
of impossible. There's impossible, as in like somebody being able
to run the four minute mind, which was once thought
of as impossible. So that's one type. But you describe
another type of impossible that might apply to more of
(09:07):
the people listening than trying to break a record that's
never been broken as an example.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Well, I think it all applies to everybody. Let me
explain what I mean by that. I have spent my
career studying those moments in time when the impossible becomes possible.
I've done this in sports, I've done this in science
and technology and business culture.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
That's what I call capital I.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Impossible, doing that which has never been done. And what
you just mentioned is lowercase I incompossible. There's small I impossible,
which is essentially who I wrote the book for. Right
lessons learned from those people who have accomplished capital impossible.
It is for anybody who's going after lowercase I impossible, lowercase
I impossibles, those things we think are impossible for ourselves.
(09:53):
I'll give you a simple example from the book. I
grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the nineteen seventies. It
was a blue collar steel and I wanted to be
a writer. I mean I wanted to be a writer
from the time I was five or six years old.
I didn't know any writers. I know how you became
a writer. There was nowhe run around to ask. There
was no internet, there were no books to read. It
was a lowercase I impossible, meaning there is no clear
(10:15):
path from where I am to where I want to
get to and statistically not great odds of success. What
are other lowercase I impossibles that we all kind of are
more familiar with getting paid for what you love to do,
overcoming trauma, overcoming an addiction, becoming world class at anything
to do, becoming a successful entrepreneur or artist. I'm missing
(10:38):
it one obvious one that's eluding me that I like
to grab for.
Speaker 4 (10:42):
But I think it paint's a good picture.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
But I want to point out a couple of things,
just to frame this up so people understand something. When
we talk about peakuman performance, we're talking about nothing more
or less, I guess, than getting our biology to work
for us rether than against us. That's all that peakhuman
performance is.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
And what this means is If.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Your goal is capital ie impossible, that which has never
been done, well, that's the biology you're going to draw.
That's how you're going to do it. If your goal
is small eye impossible, well the biology is the same,
the tools are the same. In fact, if your goal
is man, small eye impossible, caw fuck that. I'm just
trying to get through Monday, right, like, it doesn't matter.
(11:22):
The biology is the same, The set of tools are
the same because evolutions shaped human beings and the work
that I do involves figuring out how to optimize that
biology and its scales. Meaning it's the same in everyone
or At the Flow Research Collective, we train on average
about a thousand people a month, and we train everybody
(11:43):
from kind of members of the US Special Forces and
professional athletes and c suite executive CEOs of major companies
all the way to like soccer moms from Ohio and
insurance workers from Indiana and you know, software coders from
Bangalore right becauseus the work that I do is built
on biology. The principles apply to everybody and anybody can
(12:05):
use them.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
In the book, you talk about biology scaling, but personality doesn't.
And so the principles that we're going to spend a
little bit of time talking about and as I mentioned
from the number of notes I took, we're going to
skim the very slightest surface of But the principles that
we're about to cover, you're saying are happening at the
level of biology, regardless of what our psychology might be.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Yes, personality, what your genetics are. Now, if you're not
six ' ten, you know you're impossible is to be
a center in the NBA and your four foot nine.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Okay, this is not.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
What we're talking about, right, Like you need a different Like, yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
You need a different book.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
I can't help you with the genetics part at all,
Like that's a different thing.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
But barring that, yes, biology scales.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
My work is centered on the state of performance known
as flow. Right, we talked about flow as well. I
was experiencing out in the waves. It is, as I
alluded to, it's defined as an optimal state of consciousness.
We refeel our best and we perform our best. More specifically,
it's any of those moments of rapt attention, total absorption.
You get so focused on what you're doing that everything
(13:15):
else just disappears. Right time, dilights as we talked about
your sense of self disappears, actual awareness will start to merge,
and all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go
through the roof. We could talk about how what through
the roof actually means huge boosts in motivation, grit, productivity, creativity, learning, empathy, perspectives.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
So a little bit of.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Strength, stamina, fast chatters, a couple other things. We can
talk about where the why later, But the point I
want to make is those are basically all the things
you want to accelerate for cognitive It's the whole suite,
it's all our tools, they're all amplified and flow. And
here's the kicker. Everybody's hardwired for floor flow. It's a
(13:59):
foundational part of being human. Evolution shaped every human being
to perform at their best in float. Flow is how
we do. How we're hardwired for pre performance. There are
other things going on during pre performance and other things
that lead to it, but flow is at the center
of it. And one of the most well established facts
in flow science is that the state is universal, shows
(14:19):
up in anyone anywhere, provided certain initial conditions are that
so everybody watching this, listening to this can get into flow,
and you can get this same boost and performance. So
for starters, that's one thing that we're talking about. When
you say biology scales.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
Excellent, and you've written about flow elsewhere, it's been part
of your writing for a while now, and so you
say that this book expands upon that. Right, It certainly
talks about we need flow, but we also have to
train up some of the other skills like motivation, learning,
and creativity. So a lot of the book is really
(14:57):
talking about how we increase our motivation, are learning, and
how we increase our creativity. So talk about how flow
ties together with those three things.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
So, as I said, peak performance is getting our biology
to work for us right then against us?
Speaker 2 (15:13):
What is that biology?
Speaker 1 (15:15):
What are the sets of skills being amplified motivation, learning, creativity,
and flow? That is what we mean by cognitive peak performance.
The way to think about this is, in any situation,
any challenge, motivation is what gets you into the game.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Learning is what allows you to continue to play, especially if.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
You're going after like high hard goals that are that
are complicated, you don't quite not get there. Creativity is
how you steer right, creat problem solvings how you steer,
and flow is how you sort of turbo boast, all
those things sort of beyond reason with expectations. But you
asked a sort of different question, which is sort of
where I got stuck thinking about, like which way to
frame this? How they relate is interesting. So, as you
(15:55):
pointed out, I've been doing this a long time. I've
been training people in flow for years and years and years.
I think I've probably spoken to or trained a quarter
million people. Is I guess my staff has come up with.
I don't know if it's right or not, but somewhere
around there it's a lot of people. And what we've
learned about flow over the past ten to fifteen years
(16:16):
is more about the neurobiology flow, what's going on in
the brain and the body when we're in this state.
And psychology is useful, but it's often metaphor. Neurobiology is mechanism.
So if you want to make something reliable and repeatable,
you want mechanism. So that is what has happened. We've
gotten very good at training flow. And when I say
(16:38):
very good, I said that at the Flow Research Collective
we train about a thousand people a month. We measure
flow with the standard psychological instrument pre and POST, and
we see about a seventy percent boost in flow consistently
back end of our trainings, butt and button is how
everything is related. What we used to see is you
(16:59):
get this big burst and flow because it turns out
this is easy to train, and then there'd be this
spectacular return to baseline, like they'd get a ton of flow,
and then it would just like it's somebody turned off
the flow tap and flow is one of the most pleasurable, addictive, meaningful,
life affirming experiences we can possibly have. And you give
(17:19):
people a whole lot more of that and then you
take it away or it stops showing up. You have
very pissed off people. And we had very pissed off people,
and so spent a really long time trying to figure
out what the hell's going wrong? What is and what
we realized is problem wasn't flow. It was that all
the stuff that flow amplifies, but specifically motivation, learning and creativity,
(17:40):
if you hadn't trained those things up at alongside flow,
you couldn't keep pace with the acceleration that the state provided.
And worse, when psychologists and researchers talking about motivation, the
term is technically defined as the energy for action but
what they really mean as a whole bunch just motivation
is that catch all term for external motivation or extrinsic motivation,
(18:05):
So like money, sex, fame, things in the world that
we want intrinsic motivation, internal motivators like curiosity or passion
or purpose. We're also talking about goal setting and grit
and if you haven't done really good grit work right,
flows this enormously pleasurable experience, but it doesn't last forever.
And if you haven't done the good selling gridwork, there
(18:26):
are going to be days where there's no flow the
right and it's just hard work, hard slogging. And if
you haven't done the work to develop really good grit skills,
those days are going to be very, very difficult. They
get a little easier because of flow, and we know
that flow massively amplifies grit. But some people have this
problem when they do this flow work, where they start
(18:47):
to feel that it's a bliss chunkie problem. Flow is
so addictively pleasurable, right, they're like, oh, dude, everything's got
to feel this good. This is how life's supposed to feel. Well, No, no,
it's not. And there's times when you can't get into
flow or you haven't. On the really hardcore grit work,
you can't sustain the flow. It's not simple, but important.
Speaker 4 (19:06):
I think, yep, absolutely, that really covered it. And I
think you make that point a bunch of times, and
I think it's an important one that on our way
to impossible, flow is an absolute.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Booster, necessary but not sufficient, yep.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
And that it feels really good. But along the way
to impossible there's going to be a lot of feeling
not very good also. And if all we're thinking about
is oh, we, like you said, I should be feeling flow,
I should be feeling good. This should always be wonderful,
we won't have what it takes to keep going all
the way too impossible, because there are times it's not easy.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
The way I put it in the book, I think
more meaningful does not always mean more pleasant, and that
is very very true. In fact, interestingly, when positive psychologists
talk about happiness these days, there's three levels of happiness
available on the planet. The first level is happy as
how do you feel right here, right now. There's not
a whole lot you can do about that level. Right
(20:02):
you can make yourself, as Dan Harris said, ten percent
happier gratitude practice is mindfulness practices, regular acts. There's stuff
you can do, but because of how emotional set points work,
those points are set up usually about ten eleven years old,
and this is the worst we're going to feel and
is the best we're going to feel in our lives
going to take place pretty much in the middle, and
barring chronic unemployment or the death of a child. On
the low end, that's the low end, it doesn't move.
(20:24):
It's pretty set. High end can move with constant supposures
that flow, but as general, it doesn't. In other words,
you can get ten percent happy, that's about it. And
flow is no guarantee that you're going to be happier
because flow takes place when we're pushing on our skills
to the utmost. So usually when we're doing that, we're uncomfortable.
And if you're really a peak performer, you're going to
(20:45):
be uncomfortable all the time, right, because you're always sort
of trying to push on your skills and be a
little better and be a little better. You get very
good at being uncomfortable, comfortable being uncomfortable, but moment to
moment happiness probably doesn't move much. The next two levels
of happiness available to even being. The second level is
a high flow lifestyle, right. It's a lifestyle in which
(21:07):
you get regular access to flow. This could be doesn't
matter what you do. Maybe what you do doesn't produce
a lot of flow. I live in how and all
around me there's tons of people who work whatever job
they can get in the summer so they can ski
all winter. That's a high flow lifestyle, right. The best
we get to feel the planet is a high flow
lifestyle where the thing that is giving us the most
(21:30):
flow is coupled to our purpose. And you know, as
a guy who my wife and I ran an animal sanctuary,
I'm kind of in a very very very poor rural
county for a very very long time with a lot
of animal cruelty. That's a very high flow lifestyle with
a lot of purpose. It was also pretty miserable, grueling,
(21:50):
difficult work. It produced a lot of flow along the
way and a lot of meaning. My point is that
that kind of work produces deep meaning, deep contentment, deep
you piece even but happiness that means just a thin drug. Ultimately,
that's I think what you start to discover overview.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
It's not that you don't want to be happy.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
It's that it's a thin drug and there are much
better drugs.
Speaker 4 (22:13):
Out there right right, and often aiming right at happiness
as that being the goal is particularly counterproductive.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Oh yeah, it's a good way to miss it. Yeah,
it's a good way to miss it.
Speaker 4 (22:42):
So what I'm going to do from here is we're
just going to skip through a few different parts of
the book and hit some different things that bring together
some of these different components of motivation, learning, and curiosity.
So I want to talk about motivation for a minute,
because you talk about there being a stack that's really
important in the drive part of motivation, which we would
(23:05):
think of is the way most people typically think of
motivation as I feel like doing something right, I have
the energy to want to do something. And you mentioned
that there are really five things that make up this
drive stack. You talk about curiosity, passion, purpose, and then
autonomy and mastery after those, I'm wondering if we could
(23:27):
talk a little bit about curiosity, because the way that
you laid out for people to find some of their
curiosity I really loved. I really liked some of the
exercises that were there, and so I was wondering if
you could walk us through briefly the basic exercise and
how somebody can start to find maybe what their curiosity is.
(23:48):
I hear this up from a lot of people. I
don't quite know what it is. How you cultivate a
passion by sort of going through the gate of curiosity,
I guess would be the better way to say it.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
So, as you pointed out, there are a bunch of
intrinsic motivators. There are way more than the five you
mentioned curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, master but those tend in
the science to be the biggest five. Right. You could
listen intrinsic motivators forever, but those are the biggest five.
And what the research shows is that if you want
more motivation in your life, you actually start with extrinsic motivators.
(24:19):
You've got to start like with you need enough money
in a sense to take care of basic safety and
security needs. You have to deal with safety and security first.
Now it's a little bit. What the research shows is
you basically have to be able to pay all your
bills and have a little left over for discretionary spending
(24:40):
a little, it's not a whole lot. Once that's in place,
if you want more motivation, more productivity, more energy for action.
Turns out, it's not that we stop wanting things like money,
sex and fame. We still want them, but as a
driver of performance and productivity, they're not as powerful as into.
Ternal motivators are intrinsic drivers, and there's five of them,
(25:03):
as you pointed out, curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and master
These are the big five. And what you notice among
peak performers everywhere is much in the way that you
like anybody. An athlete will like stack fuel sources, meaning
they're always going to.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Hydrate super well.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
They're going to make sure they have enough protein and
carbs and fats and blah blah blah right and the
right nutrition and the right supplements and the right everything.
You also want to stack internal fuel sources. It's hard
to do anything in this world, and it's hard to
go after anything high hard goals. You need as many
of internal fuel sources as you possibly can get. In
(25:41):
other words, you want all your intrinsic motivators, your big
five aligned in point in the same direction. And they're
actually built that way. They're built to come online in
a certain order and to point us in direction. And
as you pointed out the most foundational human motivators curiosity.
So whether what's the big deal about intrinsic motivators, Like,
(26:03):
why do we even care? Why are we having this conversation?
Intrinsic motivators give us focus for free. That's the really
big deal. Your brain takes about twenty five percent of
your energy at rest, and it gets two percent of
your body weight. It's a giant energy hat, right, and
focus is a huge, huge, huge caloric energy expense.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
You're curious about it.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
You're paying attention without working too hard or at all.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Now, Curiosity, as you alluded to, is designed biologically to
be built into passion. When people say passion, what that
looks like biologically is often just the intersection of multiple curiosities.
The way to think about this is like, maybe you're
interested in football and you're interested in nutrition.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Now, each of.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Those on their own, they may not have enough energy
kind of be a lifelong passion something you're going to
spend your whole life, you know, totally paying attention to
all the time. But if you can figure out where
three or four year curiosities intersect and get a couple
of easy wins, there and get some other things going
on that I talk about in The Art Impossible. That's
(27:21):
sort of the ingredient for passion. Now, if anybody wants
to know how to do this, yes, you can read
The Art Impossible, but I can make it easier on
you. You can go to www. Thepassion recipe dot com, which
is we basically took these chapters because this was so
important to so many people, and we turn it into
an interactive workbook.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
It's free.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
You just put it online for people the Passion recipe
dot com. It teaches you how to cultivate and turn
curiosity into passion and turn passion into purpose. So if
you want to cultivate curiosity, you really just want to
start with twenty five things you're interested in it. And
all I mean by interested it is a free weekend.
(28:01):
You would maybe want to spend it watching a couple
movies about the subject, or reading a book, or having
a conversation or two with an expert. Right, that's what
I mean interested. Make a list of twenty five things
you're interested in. The key here is try to be
as specific as possible. Right, don't be interested in football,
be interested in the past, blocking mechanics, required to play
(28:24):
left tackle as precise as you possibly can be.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Right.
Speaker 4 (28:28):
I loved your punk rock analogy. You got to give
the if you remember, Oh yeah, don't be interested in
punk rock.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Right, don't be interested in punk rock. Be interested. I
think it was the evolution of political punk from Crass
to Rise Against. Had an old girlfriend who lived in
the original Crass commune, And I don't know. I'm just
a huge rise Against fan. I guess, but which is true?
Speaker 4 (28:51):
Do you love Against Me?
Speaker 1 (28:53):
I do love Against Me? They got a little more melodic.
I really like early Against Me. It's a little too
poppy for me, Like it's not quite as punk as
they were, and I like the older punk better. But
I really do like Against Me a lot. They've got
a handful of my absolute favorite punk songs ever, Miami Baby,
(29:15):
I'm an Anarchist.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
Yeah, they're live record that they put out.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Oh I love it.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
I don't know if you've yea love it.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
It's so good.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
The live version of the lyric is Condoli is Yeah,
what the hell? From her Lips to God's Ears? I
think that's the name of the song, From Her Lips
to God's Ears. The live version of that is really good. Yeah,
and Potatoes, Rice and Beans live is really good on
that album as well.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
They're an amazing live band. So we've derailed ourselves now.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
But back to punk is something. Now you got my attention.
Speaker 4 (29:46):
Maybe we'll see if we lead back around to it.
So we're making a list of twenty five things.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Yeah, twenty five things you're interested in, and then you
just want to look for places they intersect. So you know,
I said, let's say nutrition is also on your list.
Again too vague, right, you're interested in the past blocking
mechanics to play left tackle, and nutrition is too vague,
But maybe you're The example I give in the book
is insects as a few food source, right, So where
(30:13):
could they possibly intersect? Well, it requires a lot of
calories to play left tackle, right, would insects make a
good football food? That's an intersection? And all I say
is when you find those intersections, play there for a while.
Just play there, go there, hang out, spend ten minutes
twenty minutes a day, do this over months and months
(30:34):
and months. Test out those intersections. See which ones are
really sticky and grabby for you, or there's a lot
of energy. But if you can figure out where three
or four of your curiosities intersect and start playing there
and learning stuff and getting some easy wins along the way.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
That's how we build passion.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
A couple things that are worth pointing out, though, because
people have this problem when they start cultivating passion, is
they think about passion. I say, you know, give me
an example of athletic pass You get like Lebron James
coming in for the dunk, you know, with a skowl
on his face and the finals, right, And yes, you
are right, that is passion. But that is late stage passion.
(31:12):
That is not what early stage passion looks like or
feels like. Early stage passion is just a little kid
standing in a driveway trying to get a basketball to drop.
And it feels like that on the inside, right, it
feels more like curiosity and little successes than like this burning,
(31:33):
consuming thing that you think if you expect to this
like giant burning fire all at once, it's not going
to be there. And the other thing is you don't
want it there right away. What you want to do
is slowly cultivate your passion and make sure you've got
it right, because you don't want to be a couple
of years into this is my passion to discover Oh shit,
(31:53):
it was only a phase, right. I don't actually want
to spend the next two years on an archaeological dig
in the deserts of Egypt, because no, it turns out
it was a phase. Right, Like when you come to
that point, if you screw it up, it's really demotivating.
So on the front end, you want to go slowly here.
This is not one of those things in peak performance.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Everybody can do this.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Everybody can figure out align their curiosities, build them into passion,
build passion and a purpose. We're all biologically hardwired for it.
We all can do it. But you want to do
it slowly, and you don't want to be in a
rush in this case, right. A lot of people are
really impatient to be there already and get it, And
here you really don't. The system, the biology is designed
(32:38):
for this to be cultivated over time, and you don't
want to make an error on this one. This is
one of those places where you've got to go slow.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
To go fast. All right.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
Now, let's pause for a quick good wolf reminder, and
this one is on meditation. If while you're meditating your
mind wanders, you probably, like most people treat that as
a moment of failure, like ough, my mind wandered again.
But let's flip that and instead treat that as a
moment of celebration because in that moment, your mind actually
(33:07):
woke up and you were mindful of the fact that
your mind wandered. So it's a win. So if we
can flip that right on its head and say, oh,
good job, brain, we actually make it more likely that
a our brain is going to do it more often
because we're training it, and b that we're going to
enjoy it more. And specifically, it's about how to make
you not dread meditation so much and actually find it relaxing.
(33:31):
Check out my free meditation guide at Goodwolf dot me
slash calm. If you say in the book, you know,
we often think of, like you said, passion, get obsessed,
stay obsessed, and you say, you know, let's start with
get curious, Stay curious. All right, I'm going to jump
right out of that section, even though we could go
from there into how to turn that passion into a
(33:52):
purpose and you know, autonomy and mastery in that area.
But I want to move into a little bit about
grit and I want to talk about the idea of
learning to work with our thoughts as part of grit.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Oh yeah, that's really key.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
So place to start, I guess is that when psychologists
define grit, they often define it using Angela Duckworth's definition
as the intersection of passion and perseverance. And I love
Angela's work. She's an exceptionally bright woman. She's done exceptionally
great research. But when you talk to peak performers about grit,
(34:32):
they actually say, hey, wait a minute. They train six
different kinds of grit skills and all sort of require
different techniques, and in the end they sort of all
will boil down to the same thing, but you have
to train them independently for a while. The first is
the perseverance, the grit we're all familiar with, right, kick
me in the teeth, punch me in that God doesn't matter,
(34:52):
I'm still coming. And that's the first level of grit
is often and by the way, it's if you want
to train that level of grit, that level of you
want to start physically. The research says, even if you
want to train it cognitively, which is this question that
you asked about, and we're going to get there. The
place to start is physically and by perseverance. If you
(35:13):
work out, you go to the gym and you normally
do three sets of ten when you bench press. Next time,
do two sets of ten and one set of eleven,
very very slowly. You just want to push outside your
comfort zone a little bit at a time, over and
over and over again. And here's the key, especially on
perseverance side, because this is this is tricky and people
miss this a lot. It's not enough to put in
(35:37):
the hard work to get grittier. You have to notice.
So you have to in other words, you got it. Yes,
you got to show up and do that next eleventh
eleventh rep you know, every time you work.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Out, just for the next month.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
But you also got to remember at the end of
the month to look back and go, wow, the entire
time every time I had to do that eleventh breath,
I got it. I'm tough enough to do that. You've
got to remember to notice that you're developing grit along
the way, which is really important because you have to
trust that grit for it to really make a difference
in your life. You need to be able to know
that you go into the situation and you're actually grittier, right,
(36:13):
Like you can handle a little bit more, which is
why we want to do this for a long period time,
and we want to pay attention to it. Once you've
sort of become a little physically grittier, the next thing
to pay attention to if you're interested in pea performance,
if you're interested in getting through tomorrow, I think, is
the grit to control your thoughts. Right, You've got to
pay attention to what's going on up here, because you know,
(36:37):
if you're anything like me, it's bad upstairs a lot
of the time, right, And so if I'm not kind
of paying attention to what's going on in my head,
it can often swallow me. There's a number of different
ways to sort of tune your thoughts and work with
this particular problem. Gratitude less or mindfulness work meditation. These
(37:02):
are two really, really great methods. There's a lot of
other stuff you can do. If you're more kind of
kinesthetically oriented like me, you may prefer yoga to just
straight up meditation because there's some movement involved. But there's
a lot of different ways to sort of get some
space between kind of thought and emotion. There's a gap
(37:22):
between thought and emotion. What you want to try to
do is like stretch it out so that when the
thought pops up, before you get super angry and totally
lose your temper at your wife or spouse or husband
or whomever, you have a second to get in there
and be like, who wha whoa?
Speaker 2 (37:38):
Right?
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Really sure this is the reaction you want?
Speaker 4 (38:01):
You bring up a couple different things here. One is
this idea of using the phrase control in our thoughts,
which you then later sort of say, well, that's a
little bit of a misnomer, right. Any of us who
have sat down to meditate know the initial sort of
launch of a thought into our brain is not really
a controllable phenomenon. What comes up is what comes up.
It's really what we do after that. And I love
(38:24):
that you talk about the self talk. You say self
talk's really important.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
Here.
Speaker 4 (38:28):
There's a quote in here from Michael Gervais that I
absolutely love, and listeners will have heard me talk about
this a lot, and he says that there's only two
kinds of thoughts, those that constrict us or those that
expand us. And I think that is such a powerful idea.
You know, even when decision making is this decision going
to make me bigger or smaller? Is it going to
expand me or contract me? That core idea is so powerful.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
I think so too. Well.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
What I like about it is for me. When Mike
first said it to me, I thought about, well, you
know what thoughts that create more space feel like internally right,
and so that I was like, Oh, this is totally
applicable because I know what this feels like, so I
can steer from this right off the bat.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
Mike's very very good at that.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
At coming up with performance tools where you're like, oh,
I like, not only do I know what you mean,
I know what it feels like.
Speaker 4 (39:19):
That's why I love it too. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
Yeah, So I'll tell you something funny about this. This
is not exactly in the art impossible. We were having
this conversation on this phrase. So I was skiing week
and a half ago, one of the biggest lines I've
ever skied of my life, and there's one hundred foot
straight line at the end of it, which means you
don't get to.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Turn for one hundred feet.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
You just like you pin between two rock walls and
you just have to hold keep it together until you
get to the exit or you'll die and it's terrifying.
And I got into the straight line and my right
ski hit a bunch of ice icicles actually that were
fallen off the trees and into the run and it
(40:00):
was like my race ski was bouncing on marbles and
the guy was Schema said later it looked like I
started to tip forward and like I was going to somersault,
which would have put me in the hospital easy, possibly worse.
And my internal experience, the way I described it to afterwards,
like my brain found another gear, which I appropriately referred
(40:20):
to as fuck this, I'm not dying now, right, But
I like, I got incredibly angry in the moment, like
in rage, and I get what what he said is
is just look like I sat back up and shot
out of there, and I remember nothing at other than
just being like, wow, this is that feeling that precedes
(40:42):
the I'm falling now, which precedes the i'mgoing to the
hospital now.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
And I was like, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Like no, and I got super angry. And what was interesting,
and this is why I'm bringing this up, is we
were talking about that experience in the context of Mike's quote,
because you would not inspect like anger to be a
thought that creates space, but in this particular case, this
(41:07):
particular context.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
It was the only tool. Right.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
If I wouldn't have grabbed for something that would have
given me a lot of testosterone and adrenaline at that moment,
I had to fight against gravity, right, like iscles stripped beforeward,
which is really interesting. And we were talking about how
sometimes thoughts that create space are not going to be
the obvious ones sometimes. That was what the conversation was,
and I thought it was an interesting subtle point in
(41:31):
one I hadn't thought about before.
Speaker 4 (41:33):
Yeah, that's a great story. We're nearing the end of
our time. But let's hopscotch ahead in the book here,
and I want to talk about another part that I
absolutely loved, which was the five Steps to Learn Anything.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Wait wait, wait, wait wait, you left out the most
important part of that title, the five steps to learn
anything before you have a public opinion on it. Five
not so easy steps to learn anything.
Speaker 4 (41:58):
Yes, you're right, so easy steps. Yes, I better add
that to my outline. And you sort of talk about
the other part of it that I loved is you're like,
before I'm going to have a public opinion about something,
I'm going to have gone through those, and I remember thinking, boy,
that would be refreshing for the world for more people
to think, Well, before I'm going to have an opinion
(42:20):
on that, I'm going to go.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Through these five steps.
Speaker 4 (42:25):
It was really practical, and it really sort of dovetailed
in some ways with my experience of learning things. And
there were some subtleties that I had not thought of
before that I think will help me in the future.
So let's just kind of go through them relatively quickly.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
There's a lot of detail in there, but here's the
big idea. What's worth knowing is learning works a certain
way in the brain. We're designed to learn in a
certain way, and if you can sort of do that
and harness that, you can get a lot farther faster.
So in the five not Sueazy steps, basically a lesson
in how to read and how to learn from. This
(43:02):
is about knowledge acquisition, not skills acquisitions. So this is
about how do you learn a subject. It's going to
involve reading. And what I want to talk about now
is what do you pay attention to?
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Will you read?
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Because it's from a neurobiological standpoint, it's not what you
think it is, And it's much more interesting when you
actually know how the brain work is designed to work,
makes it so much easier. So the things that I
talk about paying attention to when you're reading, when you're
trying to learn, because it's not what you did in
high school or what you did in school, right, it's
almost the exact opposite one. Your brain loves narrative. Your
(43:34):
brain does cause and effect all the time. Right, this
caused this?
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Why?
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Because we want to know that. We want to know
how to create our future. Right, we want to know
if this causes this, I know how to get that,
I know how to intervene. I know how it works.
That's what a narrative is. That's what a story is.
This happened first, This happens, This happened third. Right, So
when you're reading, one of the first things we want
to pay attention to a little bit is history, the
history of a subject. First, stop being intimidated by subjects.
(44:02):
Just realize that any intellectual subject, whatever it is, it's
just a voyage of discovery.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Somebody had a question, they answered that question.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
It led to another question, and somebody had another question
and they answered that one.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
On the right. That's the voyage of discovery.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
That is any subject and it's a narrative, and so
just pay a little bit of attention to the order.
The narrative is the big Christmas tree. If you give
your brain the big Christmas tree, when the individual facts
show up ornaments, you'll have an easier time remembering them
because your brain is going to be like, oh, this happened.
I put this fact right there. It slots in. This
(44:38):
is something your brain naturally does, so you're just taking
advantage of kind of your own basic software there. The
second thing you want to pay attention to is terminology jargon.
And what I mean by that is and I will
be the first person to like, I have a flat
rule in my company and by my life. If somebody
needs a lot of big words to explain it, they're
(45:00):
probably lying. Something I learned as a journalist, right For
years and years and years, I've met the smartest people
on the planet, and most of them can explain their
thing to you as.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
If you were five years old.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
It's always the folks who don't quite know what they're
talking about that make it really fancy. In my opinion,
that said jargon, while super annoying, tends to be annoyingly
precise and technical language often contains most of a subject.
So when people talk about I need to learn a
new subject, a large chunk of what they're actually saying
(45:33):
is you need to learn vocabulary.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
So the way I do it is, when.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
I'm reading one of these books, if I'm getting fancy
language showed up that I don't understand. First time I
see the word, I ignored. The second time I see
the word I ignored. If I see a technical word
that's three, three or four times in the book, I
look it up, and then every time I see it
from that point on, I just say the definitional out
loud right instead of reading the word, I read the
definition until it starts to stick. And the reason is
(45:59):
just by learning those definitions, you start to learn huge, huge,
massive amounts about the subject, and then you have the
overarching history. But here's the most important thing, and this
is the secret to learning. When you're read in a book,
pay attention to what I call your emotional wows, those
curiosity moments where you go, what the hell are that's
(46:20):
so cool and its ideas start firing. The reason is
this curiosity is neurobiologically a little bit of dopamine and
a little bit of aura up and effort. Those are
the two neurochemicals that appear in the brain that help
produce the sensation of curiosity. But they do something else.
They prime learning. When they're in our brain, we have
(46:42):
a much easier time remembering what we're learning. So write
down this is what The only thing I really take
notes on when I read are my emotional wows. Oh.
On page seventy seven, here's this really cool idea about
pattern recognition and the brain, and it reminds me of
blob blah blah. I follow my curiosity that way, I
(47:04):
remember it. I follow my brain through a subject as
long as you follow your curiosity through a subject. Now,
by the way, this is not how you master a
subject to pass a test in college. This is not
going to help you there. This is like actual, real, practical,
real world applicable knowledge that you can do shit with
passing a test. You have requirements for that test. This
(47:27):
will help. But if you're reading Ethan Frome in college
and they're going to ask you, you may want to
write down more than just the emotional wows.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
Okay, so caveat there.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
But this will really really help because by following our curiosity,
We're following our natural learning software. That's how I do it.
The other thing that I always point out to people
because people make this mistake. I don't know if it's
that we were taught this in school or we just
assume this because it seems like Cummings says, don't always
need to understand everything. Learning means being uncertain. The internal
(48:01):
experience of learning for everyone, everybody in the world is.
Speaker 2 (48:05):
I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
Oh look I don't suck anymore, right, that's the experience
of it. In fact, my buddy Andrew Youuman is a
Stanford neuroscientist, we do a lot of work with. He says,
you know, he does a lot of work with the
Navy Seals, and he says, you know, one of the
things that peak performers, especially a speck ops guys, know
that everybody else doesn't is that peak performance it's always crawl, walk, run,
(48:30):
And the biggest difference is between peak performers and everybody else,
is that peak performers know this, and everybody else show
up and they're like, dude, man, I don't crawl. I
don't even walk. I'm going to figure out what the
shortcut is. I'm going to start by a jog, right,
And peak performers show up and they're like, you know what, Okay,
I got to crawl. Then I'm gonna walk, and then
maybe I'll run. And it's gonna suck. I suck, I suck,
(48:51):
I suck, I suck, and there's nothing to do but
to do it. And it's funny because you see these
top performers and we often think, oh my god, there's
so far ahead of the of us.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
How did they get there.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
One of the main ways they got there is every
time they're faced with the challenge, they know it's going
to suck, and they just don't care.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
They just lean right in.
Speaker 1 (49:10):
The rest of us when face for the challenge, we
dither around for a while. We're eventually going to rise
to the challenge and do the thing. You've got to
get it done, sooner or later.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
You got to.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
But most of us are like, oh, really, let me
call my brother and Tello about all the shit.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
I got it.
Speaker 1 (49:27):
You know, we do all that, but peak performers just like, nope,
crawl walk round.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
I'm just going to lean in immediately.
Speaker 4 (49:33):
That's great, So listener in thinking about all of that
and the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you
were going to isolate just one top insight or thing
to do that you're taking away, what would it be?
Remember that, little by little, a little becomes a lot,
and a habit for me that has a crude and
benefit over time is meditation. However, one of the things
(49:54):
that gets in our way of building a steady meditation
practice is that very striving. Right. Of course, course we're
doing it because we want certain benefits, but in the
moment of actually meditating, we need to let striving go
and focus on just being there and experiencing it no
matter what's happening. It becomes not enjoyable because I'm trying
(50:15):
to make something happen some special moment. We want to
let go of that. So if you want to stop
dreading meditation and actually find it enjoyable, check out my
free meditation guide at Goodwolf dot me slash Calm. I
think what you just said there is a great place
for us to wrap up the conversation, which is really
that idea of crawl, walk run. I talk about it
(50:36):
all the time on the show. We just talk about
this idea of you know, sometime we've got to be
willing to take baby steps. We've got to start where
we are and move through the progression.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
I gotta tell you something.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
I think it's all baby steps, but you've just got
to be willing to continue to take baby steps. One
of the things I tell people this isn't a one
hundred percent drew, but as a general rule, because of
emotional set points, if you've sort of survive being a teenager,
you've already felt just about the worst that life can
(51:06):
offer you. I'm not saying you can't have that bad
feeling for days and days and weeks and months on ends,
you know what I mean, But emostion those set points
are sort of set up by around you know, ten
or eleven or twelve, by like bad experiences, good experiences,
and most of life takes place in between. And then
you get teenagers where your hormones are raging and you
have no control of your emotions. So honestly, again, as
(51:29):
I said earlier, unless there's the death of a child,
the chronic unemployment, which can change this, as a general rule,
if you've survived being a teenager, you've suffered the worst
that you're going to suffer on any peak performerce Path
taking those baby steps, which is a strange thing to realize,
but it seems to be biologically true.
Speaker 4 (51:48):
Awesome, Well, Stephen, thank you so much. I found the
book absolutely fascinating, and as I said, I took so
many notes my curiosity points of things that jumped off
the page, because that's the way I prepare for these interviews.
What excited me, There were a ton of them.
Speaker 2 (52:01):
Well, thank you, I appreciate that.
Speaker 4 (52:04):
Thanks so much for taking the time to come on
the show. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
Well my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (52:08):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (52:24):
If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
consider making a monthly donation to support the One you
Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this
monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits.
It's our way of saying thank you for your support.
Speaker 4 (52:40):
Now.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
We are so grateful for the members of our community.
We wouldn't be able to do what we do without
their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted.
To learn more, make a donation at any level and
become a member of the one you Feed community, go
to oneufeed dot net, slash join the One You Feed
podcast would like to say sincerely thank our sponsors for
(53:02):
supporting the show.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.