'The Art of Impossible' with Steven Kotler

In a conversation with New York Times bestselling author and peak performance expert, Steven Kotler, on his new book, The Art Of Impossible, Leon Goren speaks with Steven about what he has learned from studying how people pull off the impossible in every domain imaginable: sports, science, technology, business, art, music, culture, etc. Building on his research and cutting-edge neuroscience, he has systematized an easy-to-follow how-to format that anyone can use to significantly improve their lives and their performance. Find out what it takes to accomplish the impossible, to shatter our limitations, exceed our expectations, and turn our biggest dreams into our most recent achievements!  

Steven decodes the secrets of elite performers - athletes, artists, scientists, CEOs, etc. - who have achieved what was previously thought of as 'impossible'. He explains how we can stretch far beyond our capabilities, making impossible dreams much more attainable for all of us. We are all capable of so much more than we know. It doesn't really matter what the "more" that you want is - maybe you want more productivity; maybe you want a more meaningful life; maybe you want to be the first person to live on Mars - the formula is always the same. We all share the same biology, and the secret to peak performance is getting our biology to work for us rather than against us.

In this interactive fireside chat, we cover:

• We are all capable of so much more than we know. Human potential is invisible especially to ourselves. There is a formula to achieve what you may believe is impossible.
• Learn how to get to a 'state of flow' - an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.
• Explore a quartet of cognitive abilities: motivation, learning, creativity and flow; and why these skills are so crucial to peak performance.
• Why not going big is so detrimental to us as leaders and individuals.
• It all begins with curiosity.

Episode Transcript

Leon Goren (00:00):
Hi, I'm Leon Goren, president of PEO leadership, a
peer to peer leadership advisoryfirm. We're an amazing community
of CEOs, presidents and seniorexecutives. Ask yourself, are
you learning as fast as theworld is changing? It's time for
Ontario business leaders to bandtogether for counseling support,
it's time for you to tap intothe business with some of our
peer groups and unlock new waysto grow. I want you to come out

(00:22):
of this COVID crisis a betterleader and your organization
ready for what's next, take thefirst step at
peo-leadership.com. A New YorkTimes bestselling author and
award winning journalist and theexecutive director of the flow
research collective. He's one ofthe world's leading experts on

(00:42):
human performance and the authorof nine bestsellers out of 13
bucks total, including the artof impossible the futures faster
than you think it's dealingfires the rise of Superman, bold
and abundance. His work has beennominated for two Pulitzer
Prizes translated into 40languages, and appeared in over
100 publications including theNew York Times Magazine wired

(01:04):
Atlantic Monthly time and theHarvard Business Review.
Stephens also the co host offlow research, collective radio,
a top 10 iTunes science podcast,and along with his wife, author,
Joey Nicholson is the co founderof Rancho Chihuahua, hospice and
special needs dog sanctuary. Soas I begin this session, here's
how the hour is gonna unfold.
fireside chat with Steven willdo for about 30 to 35 minutes,

(01:26):
and then we'll open it up to q&aand ask that you post your
questions in the chat. What I'lldo is I'll try and identify them
pick them up. And if possible,have you come off mute and ask
him the question directly. Tryand think of questions, absolute
general questions to Steven butyou got an expert in the room.
So if you're really challengedwith something, even at the

(01:47):
moment, it's a great time topush that towards Steven and see
what he can do. So Steven is sogreat to have you with us today.
Thank you for joining us with

Steven Kotler (01:56):
you. Thanks. I

Leon Goren (01:57):
know it's early.
Where are you in California

Steven Kotler (02:00):
this morning in Nevada, Northern Nevada, South
Lake Tahoe on the Nevada side.

Leon Goren (02:04):
That's beautiful.
Well, we're here in Toronto, andspring has finally arrived. So
it's awesome. We're all smiling.
So I'm going to jump right intothis with you. And we're going
to set the stage. And I know youhave it. Do obviously you do
that the biological capabilityis all within us to achieve the

(02:26):
impossible. Now we can defineimpossible, the big guy, the
smaller, but you fundamentallybelieve and you've done the
research that we all have itwithin us. And I just want to
make sure that that's how westart today. So everyone in this
room gets it in their head thatwhat they can do. It's within
their capabilities.

Steven Kotler (02:45):
That is correct.
I could say hey, I like tolittle a little more dramatic
than I might have presented itbut foundationally Correct, yes.
What 30 years of sitting kind ofthe I work on the neurobiology
of peak human performance. Sowhat's going on in the brain and
the body wouldn't perform at ourbest. And there's a bunch of
different things going on. Butwhat you're really referring to

(03:08):
and when we say everybody ishardwired for the extraordinary,
everybody's hardwired to tackleimpossible challenges. Um, one
of the things we're talkingabout is that every human being,
and in fact, most mammals arehardwired to produce a state of
consciousness known as flow,right? You may call it Runner's
higher being in the zone orbeing unconscious flow is a

(03:30):
technical term, it istechnically defined as an
optimal state of consciousness,we feel our best and we perform
our best we're all familiar withit flow refers to any of those
moments of rapt attention andtotal absorption, it's so
focused on the task at hand,everything else just seems to
disappear. Action awareness willstart to merge, your sense of
self self consciousness that'sgoing to diminish. Time is gonna

(03:51):
pass strangely, it'll speed upand five hours go by in like
five minutes, maybe it'll slowdown and you get a freeze frame
effect. My name has been in acar crash throughout all aspects
of performance, both mental andphysical go through the roof. So
when we say everybody is capableof extraordinary flow is an
extraordinary boost to ourcapabilities, motivation, grit,
learning rates, creative problemsolving, productivity, empathy,

(04:15):
environmental awareness,strength, fast twitch muscle
response, I can go on all ofthese things, massively increase
in flow, in some cases, 500%above baseline. And let me give
you one example, just made thateven a little more clear.
McKinsey, the businessconsultancy, went around the
globe talking to CEOs topleaders about how much more

(04:36):
productive they felt in flow.
And it's self reported a grainof salt, but they spent a decade
doing it, and the average was500%. more productive. 11% more
productive means you can go towork on Monday, spend Monday in
a flow state, you take Tuesdaythrough Friday off you're still
going to get as much done aseverybody else. Two days a week
and flow you're 1,000% moreproductive than the competition.

(04:58):
So this is a massive actiontoleration above baseline, and
it's available to each and everyone of us. If I were to put it
more broadly, I would say luck,performance, whatever you want
to call peak performance, it'snothing more or less than
getting our biology to work forus, rather than against us. And
that's a limited set of skillsflows a big part of it. There's

(05:19):
other things that come intoplay. But it's a biology is
limited. So if we can get itoptimized, if we can get it
working together, working theway the system was designed to
work, the way to evolve to work,we get farther faster with a lot
less plus, that's the big deal.

Q&A from Audience (05:36):
Makes a lot of sense. And I agree, thanks
for starting with the flow,because that as I went through
your book, and you and I talkedabout this, right, you broke it
down into motivation,creativity, learning, learning
and creativity, the flow flowsthrough the whole thing, every
one of those different chapters.
Today, you know, I'm thinkingabout the environment we all
live in today, right? So us ismaybe a little bit different

(05:58):
than Canada, but we're still inthe midst, I think North
American wide, we're all throughgoing through COVID. Hopefully,
we're in the marathon, thefinish line is coming. We're
hoping at least it's withinvision. I know there's a lot of
reflection going on. But a lotof people today, like we've gone
through a year of this, it'sbeen insanity. In the beginning,
the motivation, when I'm tryingto understand and maybe you can

(06:20):
help the audience here, I sayreflect, I kind of think it's
almost a great time to startthinking about
finding that new passion,finding that new purpose
potentially revitalizingthemselves. And in that early
section, a book can you talkmotivation, you talk about

(06:41):
finding the passion, maybe walkus through some of the ideas
around that people who are goingthrough this a little bit right
now where they would start?

Unknown (06:50):
Perfect.
So

Steven Kotler (06:56):
let me put up when we say motivation, which is
where if you're interested inpeak performance, as you
mentioned, yeah, there are fourmajor sets of skills are
motivational skills, learningskills, creativity, skills, and
flow skills. If you want asimple way to think about it,
motivation gets you into thegame. Learning allows you to

(07:18):
continue to play creativity ishow you steer and flow is how
you turbo boosts the resultsbeyond expectation. That's the
simple way to think about it.
But when you say motivation, orlearning or creativity or even
flow scientifically, these arecatch all terms. Right?
motivation doesn't just meanmotivation. It means extrinsic
motivation, stuff we want in thereal world that will work hard

(07:38):
for money, sex, fame, intrinsicmotivation, curiosity, passion,
purpose, autonomy, mastery,right? things that really drive
us on the inside. They also meangrit and goals. At the heart of
the question is where do youstart at a basic level, where
you want to always want to startis just to put it in context is
with extrinsic motivation, whatthe by science is really clear

(08:02):
on this, starting with AbrahamMaslow and going all the way
through Danny Kahneman today. Ifyou want to increase motivation,
the first place you got to startis with safety and security
motivation, you have to makeenough money to pay your rent,
pay your bills. And to notworry, right, that's probably
not a problem for anybodylistening today. But it is
probably an issue for some ofyour employees. So if you're

(08:24):
trying to motivate employees,right, and they are literally
wondering, you know, can I makemy rent? Can I pay my bills,
where's my next paycheck gonnacome from? You literally can't
you're blocking blocking peakperformance. If people have the
anxiety that comes from thatit's a it stands in the way of
all peak performance. Oncethat's problem is solved,

(08:45):
intrinsic motivation comes nextinternal motivators. There are
there tons of internal drivers,but there are five big ones,
right? curiosity, passion,purpose, autonomy, mastery, and
they're designed to worktogether. They're designed to
come online in a specific order.
And the way you should thinkabout this, and this is the

(09:06):
answer to your question, Leon,if you're looking for more
passion and purpose in yourlife, curiosity is the
foundational ingredient inpassion. When we say curiosity,
when we're curious aboutsomething, the brain produces a
little bit of norepinephrine anda little bit of dopamine. These
are performance enhancing neuralchemicals. They do a bunch of

(09:26):
things in the brain in the body,but mainly they drive focus. So
when you're curious aboutsomething, you pay attention to
it, no work required happensautomatically. If you can find
the intersection of multiplecuriosities, where three or four
your curiosities intersect,that's the seed kernel of
passion. Passion is mystified intoday's world, we hear all about

(09:49):
it. Oh, I want to find mypassion. It's super important
and like, first of all, what'sthe big deal about passion you
get focused for free, that's thebig deal produces this shit ton
of norepinephrine and dopaminemean and like, think about
romantic love when you fell inlove with you know your first
girlfriend or boyfriend, howmuch attention were you packed,
you couldn't stop focusing onthem and happened automatically

(10:10):
didn't have to do hard work. Soif you can find the intersection
with a place where multiplecuriosities intersect and start
to kind of play their meaning,find the intersection, just
learn more and more about thatintersection, 20 minutes a day,
just play there, play there,play there, start getting some
easy wins in that intersection,it'll start to build, it'll

(10:32):
start to build and start tobuild. That's how you kind of
develop passion, you thenliterally can take that passion,
and you couple it to a causegreater than yourself something
outside yourself, right? I liketo say, Make a list of 25 things
you're curious about, then findplaces that you know, four or
five, tend to intersect. Right,give you an example, let's say

(10:54):
and one thing when you're doingthis work, you want to be as
specific as possible. The brainworks really well with
specifics. It doesn't work withgeneralities. So it's not. I'm
interested in football and food.
It's, I'm interested in themechanics of what does it take
to play left tackle? And I'minterested in insects is a new
protein source. Okay, those areyour two curiosities. And my

(11:15):
curiosity. I mean, like you gota free weekend, you want to
spend it, reading some books,watching some movies talking to
an expert like we're not, thisis not complicated.
Where to football and foodintersect? Well, I don't know,
left tackle is a job thatrequires a lot of energy. Do

(11:35):
insects make a good food sourcefor playing left tackle? That's
the intersection. It's been 20minutes researching that today,
tomorrow, the next day, the nextday, see if it starts to write
one curiosity, there's notenough energy there for passion,
you find multiple intersectionsand energy there, you couple it
to a problem that is greaterthan yourself. And what happens
when you do that, again, purposeis one of these terms that like

(11:57):
we sort of mystify in the modernworld, we think all purpose is
so altruistic, it's so great.
For the world, you're such agood person, you have purpose,
you want to help the world. Thatmay be true, but from what
biological performanceperspective purposes is entirely
selfish. You kick thenorepinephrine and dopamine, the
feel good and performanceenhancing reward chemicals that
show up with passion, and thenyou get more feel good reward

(12:18):
neuro chemistry, you getendorphins, oxytocin, serotonin,
all the chemicals that show up.
Once there's other peopleinvolved in a situation. When
you're trying to solve a problemin the world, you're helping
other people, and you get prosocial reward chemicals as a
reward. So what do you get youget more feel good drugs on the
inside and greater productivityon the outside focus for free

(12:41):
everywhere you want to go?

Q&A from Audience (12:44):
What would you tell people in terms of
finding that passion? Likeyou're talking about 20 minutes
a day? Is it a? Is it a processthat will take me a month or
two? Is it a process? Maybe acouple years? Will it change?
Like what happens when mypassions change over time? And
can I have more than one?

Steven Kotler (12:59):
First of all two things, right? One, all the
really slow breakdown is in theart impossible, the new book,
but I've just put puttingsomething in the in the chat, we
took the front of the book, Thepassion recipe, which is how you
turn curiosity and passionpassion into purpose and turned
it into a free workbook and or akind of video breakdown of how

(13:22):
to do it. So I just put that inthe chat that's available to
anybody, you can go there and gocrazy on how to do it. Here's
the thing, you want to do thisslowly. In peak performance,
there are a handful of placeswhere you have to go slow to go
fast. Passion, cultivatingpassion and turning passion. The

(13:42):
purpose is really important. Andthe reason is simply this, you
do not want to be two years intoyour passion to discover, oh,
it's only a phase, right? Like Ihad a friend who got super
passionate about archaeology,like out of nowhere, suddenly,
they're gonna be career changed.
I'm an archaeologist, they getall crazy that all worked up and
set up for a two year dig inEgypt. And they get like six

(14:03):
weeks into the dig. And they'relike I frickin can this and I'm
like, I'm now slave labor forthe next 18 months. And you
really want to do this slowly.
And don't be impatient withyourself. The biology is
actually designed to work alittle more slowly here for a

(14:24):
lot of these reasons, so youcan't be impatient with yourself
in any of this work. beingimpatient with yourself. Really,
it's just so costly to do peakperformance work. Self
forgiveness, and patience arejust really key. You'll just get
so much more work done with somuch less pain. If you have a
little bit of self forgivenessand a little bit patience with

(14:46):
the process.

Leon Goren (14:47):
I love that. The other thing that struck me is

Steven Kotler (14:50):
IQ Jeff, I'm sorry, I'm a moron. I'm a smart
moron, but I'm still a moron.

Leon Goren (14:59):
Do we spell it wrong? Stephen No, no, not.

Steven Kotler (15:02):
I put I put a thought there were there. There.
There wasn't one.

Leon Goren (15:07):
That's great. So the other thing I picked up here
that I really think big, likethere isn't, you know, you kept
you talk about it numerous timesin that book. It's not just we
need to extend our thinking, weneed to think bigger than we're
actually thinking. A lot of thetime, especially,

Steven Kotler (15:23):
let me the way I was explaining this to people,
because it's really you'll getit when you're on. So I spent my
whole career around people whohave accomplished capitalize on
possible right that which hasnever been done. And that's what
I've spent my career studying.
When you get into the right,I'll give a simple example of my

(15:45):
own personal experience. My oneof my closest friends and my
partner, sometimes a writingpartner, we've written three
books together. Peter Diamandiswas the original founder of the
XPrize. And the XPrize. unlockedthe space frontier, Peter wanted
to make private space travelavailable to anyone you wanted
to go into space, he knew NASAwasn't going to give him a ride,
ride, he was too short, hedidn't follow directions. Well,

(16:07):
like they were just he was notastronaut material. He knew it
right. But he wanted to unlockthe space frontier. And so we
created the XPrize. And it was aprivate competition for the
first outside team that canbuild a private spaceship go
into space twice in two weeks.
And that's a reusable space. Itwas the thing that nobody could
build, and run like the spacefrontier. And it when when he

(16:32):
proposed it, I wrote the firstinternational major article on
Peter Wright. And ever I talkedto everybody in the aerospace
community, and they allbasically said, Peters out of
his frickin mind, this is nevergoing to happen is impossible.
Then I took the Massa, they sortof reiterated every point in
much more colorful language. Andthey were like, Look, we get to

(16:52):
the moon, we took 10,000engineers, and it took $10
billion. And that's what it'sgoing to take anybody, there's
no way, you know, you put up $10million for a team. It's never
gonna happen. This is crazy.
You're out of your frickin mind.
And yet, eight years later, orcan when's the XPrize with a $30
million spaceship, and a team of30 engineers and unlocks the

(17:13):
space frontier in private spaceis now a $3 billion a year
industry and growinggangbusters, right? He that's an
impossible thing he did. And Igot to watch the entire thing up
close and personal. So what doesit look like to see the
impossible be impossible upclose and personal. Check it
out. Peter wakes up, he'sbreakfast talks on the phone for

(17:34):
a little while, then he typesinto his computer, he goes to
the bathroom. Then he comesback, he touches on his
computer, and he gets on adifferent phone call. And then a
different phone call. Then hehas lunch, after lunch, maybe
takes a nap maybe goes to thegym. He has more phone calls,
couple more conversations, andthen there's food. Sound
familiar? We all have the same24 hours in the day, we all

(17:56):
basically do the same thing inthose 24 hours. Often the only
difference between do I want tounlock this bass frontier? Or do
I want to become the best drycleaner in Shaker Heights, Ohio,
the energy requirement is thesame. If you're interested in
being the best. You're going togive everything you got to every

(18:16):
moment. That's what we do whenwe're interested in being the
best. So the energy and whatyou're doing with it, it's
roughly the same. It's the sizeof the original vision that
matters so much. I talk a lotabout this. In my book bold,
which is a book on how do yousolve impossible business
challenges. And it came fromspending a lot of time with
Larry Page, Elon Musk, JeffBezos, Richard Branson, people

(18:39):
who've done possible businessthings in near record time. And
we talked a lot about Google'smoonshots. Right? What's a
moonshot? a moonshot is right, a10x improvement over existing
right structures. So it's 1000times better. And if you talk to
the guys at Google about like,what's the advantage with
moonshots? They'll say, look,sure, you're going to fail a

(19:02):
bunch. It's going to happen,right? These are moonshots. But
it is often easier to go forsomething that is 1000 times
better. And something that's 10%better, because you're 10%
better, you Selena smart messcontest with everybody else in
the world who's trying to be 10%better. But if you're 1,000%
better, you have to throw outeverything that's existing, all

(19:23):
the rules, all the technology,all the ideas, you've got to
start over. And that's aliberating structure that often
makes it easier to go big,rather than go small. And as you
pointed out, as we started thisfor a lot of different
biological reasons, the humanbrain is actually hardwired to
go big. we're hardwired for selfactualization. We want to become

(19:45):
the very best version ofourselves. That's how we're
biologically designed. Or, asAbraham Maslow famously said,
whatever a human being can be,they must be.

Leon Goren (19:57):
Yeah. That's great.
Thank you for that, you know, asthe, as you think big, you know,
one thing that strikes me maybethis leads into the next thing,
it's, we're all gonna, we're allgonna run into roadblocks so I'm
gonna assume everyone in theroom, everyone knows how to set
goals. Maybe they don't know thebig goals, but they bring it
down into smaller goals. But asfrom working towards that, that

(20:19):
impossible. Whatever we defineit as for each of us, it's
different. We're gonna run intowalls all the time. You talk
about the grit element, theferocity element bringing flow
into it. Can you share someideas around the challenges we
face or we're going to face aswe move towards impossible, and

(20:44):
perhaps overcoming a little bit,trying to trigger flow to help
us a lot of short term basis?
I'm dropping stuff here.

Steven Kotler (20:55):
I just thought there was somebody very small
living under your desk.

Leon Goren (20:58):
No, my dog's big, but it was me that dropped that.

Steven Kotler (21:03):
One of the really interesting, we're gonna you're
gonna run into challenges don'tI mean, let's not kid ourselves,
whether you know, it'scapitalized and possible doing
that which has never been donesmall ly impossible. That stuff
we think is impossible forourselves. Or even if you just
want to be more productive andcreative at work next week. Good
news is the biology is the samethe toolkits the same. Bad news

(21:26):
is it's not easy. Like it's justnot it's not easy, in general
here on planet Earth. Andperformance is an easy, I will
say that I really think that theonly thing worse than the pain
of stocking the impossible isthe pain of not trying to stock
the impossible. I think tryingto live with ourselves and live

(21:49):
with underachievement is muchmore difficult study than
possible, I will also tell you,this is just a cool random
thing. But it tends to be true,not entirely, I'll give you
caveats. But here's, here's theone thing you should know, then
we'll go into grit. So we havewhat are known as emotional set
points, these are createdroughly by the time we're 1011

(22:09):
or 12. And we have a low pointand a high point, the low point
is roughly the worst we're gonnafeel on the planet, the high
point is roughly the best we'regonna feel most of life takes
place in the middle. Now you canmove these points, right,
regular access to flow willincrease the the upper end of
the emotional side, once youcan, life gets better a lot.
death of a child or chronicunemployment will lower the
lower setpoint. But other thanthat life is going to take place

(22:32):
inside the inner now I want youto think about something you've
all been teenagers. What doesbeing a teenager mean? It means
that your brain is not fullydeveloped means you have no
emotional regulationcapabilities, and it means your
hormones are raging. In otherwords, you've already probably
felt the very worst you're goingto feel on this planet. If you
survive being a teenager, andyou've made it into adulthood,

(22:55):
you've actually already toughenough to take anything that's
coming. With a couple ofexceptions, you may have to deal
with that agony. A couple daysin a row, it may stretch out for
a longer period of time, buthonest to God, like we don't
think about it, because nobodytalks about it this way. But
like a lot of people are like,oh god, what if what, what's
that? What's that going to? Whatam I can achieve what? Well, I
don't know. But you've alreadyexperienced the worst, probably

(23:18):
that you can feel, actually. Soone, you're tough enough. So I
get to what the research showsabout grit is it is easier to
train grit after you sort of getall your intrinsic motivators
pointed in the same direction.
Because once that happens,you're going to start
automatically a lot of theintrinsic motivators are flow
triggers, they preconditionsthat lead to more flow below,
amplifies massively amplifiesgrit. Once an experience starts

(23:40):
producing flow, we love it, wego extraordinary or out of out
of our way to get more of it.
And grit sort of takes care ofitself. To put in more specific
terms, they did a really coolstudy of like a giant High
School 542 students, and theylooked at the students, what
they called their primarysecondary activity. School was

(24:01):
their primary activity. So thisprimary secondary play tube in
the band, you play football,right? Are you in debate club,
whatever it was, and they askedwhat conditions if you're doing
this freshman year, what are theconditions that guarantee that
you had the grit to still bedoing it when you graduated as
senior. And what they found isthere was only one condition

(24:22):
that experiences that producethe most flow as a freshman.
Those were the guarantees thatthey were going to still be
doing it as a senior flow andgrit are often very synonymous,
which is why you want to starttraining grit. After you
certainly got everything pointedin the same direction and
starting to produce flow. So onethat makes the grit training

(24:44):
easier, you're less likely toburn out it's less likely to be
as miserable and it's much morerewarding along the way. The
other thing is this. We aredesigned biologically hardwired
to for grit. I mean you beingsare incredibly gritty, for
example, we are the only speciesthat evolved to run down our

(25:06):
prey. Human beings are designedto be gritty enough to chase an
antelope across a desert forthree days and catch it for
dinner. We are so gritty on theinside, from an evolutionary
perspective, it's insane. Wejust met William James pointed
this out all the quotes in theart impossible. But like 100
years ago, he said, Look, we allhave the experience of second

(25:27):
wind, we've all had thatexperience, you're exhausted,
you're tired, whether it's atwork or doing some athletic or
whatever. And suddenly you havea second wind, what most people
don't realize is there's a thirdwind, a fourth, wind, a fifth
wind a six win, because you'renot reliably pushing on your
skills. So the good news is,grit is remarkably easy to
train, it's really easy to trainon the bad. The bad news is, it

(25:51):
doesn't feel very good. Onesecret, though, which is kind of
counterintuitive, because I'mguessing that most people, you
know, on the zoom call, theywant more grit at work, they may
want more, a little more grit atthe gym, or they might want a
little more grip in theirrelationships, or whatever. But
you really want to be a littlegrittier at work. What's
interesting is if you wantcognitive grit, what the

(26:12):
research shows is, you want tostart on the physical side. So
you literally want to start inthe gym, or with whatever kind
of physical activity. This isnot always the case that the
body has primaries see over themind, like it's not there's,
there's a bunch of physicalchauvinists in the embodied
cognition world that you'll bumpinto, if you get into this, this
this world at all, who like totell you that all the body is

(26:34):
the master thing. And don'tworry about the brain start with
the body, it's not true at all,except for gret. So like, if you
literally want to be more grittyat work, what you want to start
doing is if you're going to thegym, and you're doing, you know,
1010 exercises, three sets of 10each exercise. Next time you go
to the gym, it's three sets oftwo sets of 10 and one set of

(26:54):
11. On one of those exercises,you start really small, and you
just push a little bit, a littlebit a little bit. And what
you're trying to do is literallyjust teach your brain that
you're tough enough to take it.
grit is less about, can Ipersevere, and more about
teaching the brain that you'renot going to die if you
persevere, right, because thebrain wants to convince you that

(27:16):
you're going to die if you pushthrough this, and nothing could
be farther from the truth.

Leon Goren (27:23):
So I think those on the call, there's a lot of
leaders on the call, they had tohave grit, they didn't get to
where they were without grit,because everyone's gone through
some challenges, especially inthe business world, is what he
and I mean, this outside of thecontext of the book, but as
leaders, we you know, one of thechallenges we have is engaging
and inspiring our people, right.
So driving, having getting apassionate having them have a

(27:46):
purpose around the organizationto push for helping them develop
some grit to actually pushforward as well. You've worked
with a lot of leaders, is thereanything that sticks out in your
mind in terms of how they'vebeen effective within their
organization, engaging others,like what we've talked about
today is engaging ourselves, wecan control that. Are there

(28:07):
tricks that we can use to engageour teams and our people to get
them as passionate and engaged?

Steven Kotler (28:16):
Yeah.

Unknown (28:18):
So

Steven Kotler (28:22):
two things are pretty clear. So the first is
psychological safety that's beeneverywhere these days, right?
But um, simply put, anxiety,blocks peak performance, right,
the more anxiety in our system,the worst we're going to

(28:42):
perform. And this is why you'reseeing gratitude practices or
mindfulness practices are thebest way to fight anxiety. By
the way, gratitude, practicemindfulness, or breath, work,
focus, meditation, or exercise.
So one of the reasons you'reseeing so much of that stuff
rolled out, place to start, itcalms people down. Group flow is

(29:03):
the shared collective version ofthe flow state, right? It's what
you want in your team, it's ateam performing at their very
best. And group flow like flowhas triggers, there are
preconditions that will lead tomore group flow there, there are
10 that are known. This is notmy work. It was the work of a
guy named Keith Sawyer. He's apsychologist at the University

(29:25):
of North Carolina, um, who Ioriginally identified these
things. So if you want morepassion, performance, or all
that stuff from your team, oneof the things to do is really
pay attention to group flowstriggers, you can find really
full breakdown at the end of myrecent book, The Impossible key
so I wrote a fantastic bookcalled group genius about all
his work on how he came up withthese both those are a really

(29:47):
decent place to start on. You'llnote when you look at the group
flow triggers, there is a lot ofoverlap between some of the
triggers and psychologicalsafety and a lot of the triggers
are less about how you act inthe room with the team and more
about how do you build the team?
How do you design high flowteams? And the third thing that

(30:11):
I think is just I mean, this isso obvious It was funny. I was
Daniel Goleman, who basicallyinvented emotional intelligence.
and I were talking a coupleabout a month ago about about
this very question, because hehas spent really, for rowsley,
long time 30 years now lookingat emotional intelligence in

(30:32):
leaders, what makes a goodleader the very, the very
question you asked, he's reallylooked at it. And so when I was
talking to him, I was pickinghis brain on this and the same
thing I wrote, you know, at theflourish, collective 70 people
work for me, right? It's a it'sa, it's a pretty, it's a we're a
midsize company. And, you know,I am an old school, punk rocker
from Cleveland, Ohio, I'm not aguy who's like, ever thought he

(30:53):
was going to be, you know,leading, you know, a eight
figure company with 70 people.
But, so I've had to learn a lotof this stuff on the fly also,
as well. And one of the thingswe were talking about, and when
I was laughing, because I fellshort on this as well is you're
going to be a visionary leader,map passionate people underneath
you, you have to be you have tobe communicating that vision to

(31:15):
your company, right? in artimpossible. I talked about the
three tiers of goal setting thetop is a massively
transformative purpose. Right,massively transformative purpose
is a mission statement for yourlife. Underneath that you'll
find hard goals, and then cleargoals and they're all sort of
chunks of of the bigger thingbut massively transformative
purposes. came out of work thatPeter Diamandis, myself and a

(31:39):
guy named Salinas Valley was theoriginal executive director of
Singularity University, wherethey study exponential
technology and how you apply toinnovation, solving global
challenges. We were doing astudy, Selene pioneered it, of
the 100 fastest growingcompanies in the world. And one
of the things that we found isthey all had massively

(31:59):
transformative purposes. They'reall and it was extremely well
communicated to all employees.
And I'm not talking about yourlike, crappy mission statement
that you that you that you'vewrote, I'm talking about, like,
you know, this is Google,organize the world's
information. It's something thateverybody can focus on every

(32:20):
knows where the company's going,and what what they're doing,
etc, etc. Those are reallyreally useful if you're if
you're looking for passion, ifyou're looking for great if
you're looking you need sharedgoals is a flow trigger, right
as a group flow trigger, and asshared massively transformative
purpose is a very powerful placeto start with an organization.

Leon Goren (32:44):
I love that you have that vision bigger than the
organization or that purpose.
The MTP described shared goals,and then the ability to win
together and share those wins. Imean, I think about sports,
right to be an individual sport,but if it's a team sport, big
gymnastics, swimming, we talkedabout right? The flow that
happens when your teammatesstart to win carry right through

(33:05):
you and increase.

Steven Kotler (33:08):
This is Yeah, the other thing, by the way, is all
the flow stuff. Flow iscontagious. Emotions are
contagious. There's a facialsignature for flow. When we move
into flow at a microexpressionlabel level, your muscles are
paralyzed and your smilemonsters are hyperactive facial
expressions because we're mirrorneuron systems are automatic. So

(33:30):
like I mimic your, your facialexpressions, when I talk to you,
this is how we bond right? Thisis, by the way, also why people
start looking like their dogs.
Since you have a dog in youroffice. I thought I'd mentioned
this, right? Your dogs areactually better face readers
than humans. They're alwayslooking at your face, reading
your emotions, and the way theycan figure out what your feeling
is they mimic your face to feelyour feelings because that's how

(33:51):
mirror neurons work. So why doyour dog Why do our dogs end up
looking like owners and ownerslike their dogs? Because you
guys are mimicking facialexpressions over the years.

Leon Goren (34:01):
They were just people walking down my street
saying you look like your dog.

Steven Kotler (34:06):
I take that as a compliment. I think my dogs are
very handsome.

Leon Goren (34:10):
That's great. All right. I'm going to go to some
questions. Some questions arecoming in. I know I can keep
pumping these questions out. ButDarryl Cardon, if you want to
come off mute, and ask aquestion directly to students.
Before we head into the q&aportion of this webcast. First,
a brief note about p OEleadership from one of our
members.

Paul Zadorsky (34:32):
What I love about Keo leadership right now is how
well our members are supportingeach other and rising to face
the COVID-19 Challenge halls thedorsky Senior Vice President
Crayola international businessis all about being able to
rapidly adapt to change. But howdo you learn as fast as the
world changes? PEO leadershiplets you tap into the collective
wisdom of some of Canada's topexecutives having that peer

(34:52):
group and broader leadershipcommunity to lean on. It makes
all the difference. The time tostep up and lead is now go to
PEO dash Leadership calm.

Q&A from Audience (35:01):
You bet. Hey, Steven. Um, I love the book. One
of the things about surprisethat surprised me in it was when
you talked about getting afteryour biggest and hardest task
first, like implying thatproductivity was kind of a
depleting resource likewillpower. I was expecting that

(35:23):
to read, you say that, like thedopamine, dopamine you would get
from task completion would kindof act as a neurobiological
leverage that would then helpyou get after a bigger task in a
bigger task, where you kind ofcrescendo throughout the day,
due to the neuro chemistry, canyou talk a little bit about why,

Steven Kotler (35:45):
Darryl, that's one of the smartest questions
I've been asked in a really longtime. I can absolutely. It's
totally logical why you thinkthat? And I don't? So I don't
actually I don't I haven't hadan answer. I've never heard the
question asked before. And itseems totally obvious. Like, why
isn't somebody to here's what Ithink is the answer. And I, the

(36:07):
person, I need to call this wordBaumeister who did all the work
on willpower. He's probably theperson that would have the best
answer to this question. And itmight already be in his data
somewhere, though, I haven'tseen it. What I'm what I think
is this. And now let's say thisis an 80 85% answer. And this

(36:28):
15% there, I'm probably way offbase. But the cognitive load
that comes from your hardesttask, right, is usually so
significant, that once you clearit out of the way, you end up
delivering so much more energyfor focus and attention. That

(36:51):
that is probably coupled to thefact that willpower declines
over time, put those two thingstogether, and I would guess
those forces are stronger thanthe dopamine high. Now, here's
the couple of caveats thattotally throw a wrench under all
this. If your hardest taskdrives you into a really deep

(37:15):
macro flow state. Cool,fantastic, you know, you'll get
pushed all the way through theday. But let's say like, you
can, one of the things that willdrive flow is a little bit of
domain, a little bit of delvingto flow domains of focus and
chemical, you start stacking updopamine in the system. Now, if
your tasks are two hours long,and whatever the domain is not

(37:35):
delbene lasts about 20 minutes,so it's not gonna let linger
long enough to do that. But ifsome of the tests are really
short, there might be somethingto what you're saying, like
there might be what I think is ageneral, my prescription is
going to win over time. Butthere are going to guarantee
you, if we were to look at this,they're going to be very

(37:56):
specific kinds of situations,they may vary individual to
individual. So there may be aprescriptive that I can say all
this will work for everybody. Idon't that that could be true.
But I think there are going tobe situations when your ways is
better. I don't quite know whatthose are on one. Social, like
if you have a really hardmeeting, you're a salesperson,

(38:19):
right? And there's a reallytough customer, you probably
don't want them to be your firstcustomer. You right, you
probably want a little bit of agroove. And some of that don't
mean the pro social chemicals.
So that's one situation where Ican think, okay, I can see your
way working better than youknow, I mean, the way that we
talked about in the book, it'swhat 30 years of, of kind of

(38:39):
research and data has has toldus, but it's sciences it you
know it we overturn ideas allthe time. So you asked a really
great question. I don't have agreat answer for you. I fumbled
around my way. Roy Baumeister isgoing to be the person who does
have that great answer. I thinkI'm now going to call him. It's
a cool question that I hope myanswer is satisfactory. I'm a

(39:03):
little bit.

Leon Goren (39:07):
Great. Thanks for the question. I'm Tom Kay, I see
on my screen, you want to comeoff mute and ask your question.
And by the way, I haven't readthe book, but I wanted to it's
ordered so so it will becorrected. I just had a question
in terms of the impulsepossibility. So Google might
have big goals, but they don'tchase every one of them. Right.
So I find these days in themarketplace. And I'm technology,

(39:30):
people tend to tend to pivotvery quickly because they get
all these new technologiescoming at them. So their real
question is how to distinguishbetween you know, the practical
component of chasing that bigidea. And and you know, because
you can't, you can't just chaseeverything that looks like the
next great thing, right. So asJeff some thoughts on how people
filter those things,

Steven Kotler (39:52):
so if you're asking a business
Technology question that answersprobably in my book, The future
is faster than you think, interms of how do you track
exponentially growingtechnology? Where is it going?
What are the markets going to doall those? So there's that side

(40:12):
of the question, let me stay onthe human performance side of
the question a little bit foryou. Because that's a different
thing. I think. I think there'stwo things that are important
here. The first is, we all know,if we're good at business, that
there's certain situations wherethe very best thing to do is to

(40:34):
like walk away and startsomething, right, there are
times you got to shut it down onthis project. But Google, as you
pointed out, Google kills waymore stuff than they let live,
right? They went when, when inin their skunk works in Google
X, the ratio is crazy. It's like100, to one in terms of what
they kill versus what they letlive. And there are a bunch of

(40:57):
different organizational, youknow, gateways to do that. You
know, one of the things that wedo organization with the flow
research collective, and this isI have a different answer for
you, but I'm just gonna throwthis out, is when, when it comes
to these things is I we putperiodic guys making sure we're

(41:18):
asking the questions that sortof don't allow us to, like, you
know, everybody's trying tosystematize things and
streamline and that stuff. Butevery two to three months we
have we have big meetings wherewe're like, okay, we built
systems, we streamline we triedthese processes. Now, what blind
spots do we create along theway? And what are we totally not
looking at? And let's reevaluatethis stuff that way. So that's

(41:40):
just one of the things we do.
That's not my answer. My answerto you is on a more personal
level, is this. The way I thinkabout it from my own life is
this. And what the researchshows is that you want three
tiers of goal setting, massivelytransformative mission statement
goals, high hard goals, that arethe chunks that feed into your

(42:00):
mission statement. And thenclear goals. What are you doing
today, to feed into your highergoals to feed into your mission
goals? So let's say one of yourgoals is to you know, make
movies and inspire you know,audiences worldwide. That's your
hot, that's your mission levelgoal. So you know, a high our
goal would be go to film school,get a you know, make your first

(42:24):
movie about cooking, make blah,blah, okay, you get the idea and
clear goals. What am I going todo today to make that for right,
that's how that's how the systemworks. But what those goals are,
especially at the top is theirfilters. I have three mission
level goals for my life. Andthen there's three things I have
to do almost every day tosupport those goals. Right? And

(42:46):
I know that those are my firstfilters, if a project comes my
way. And it fits with thosegoals, great. I say yes, if it
doesn't, it's gone. It's a wasteof my time, because I'm driving
in a certain direction. So onethings about this level of goal
setting as it becomes your firstfilter for your life.
Predominantly, because I know ifit's not aligned, my core

(43:08):
mission, right, and my corepassion, my core purpose, and
all that stuff, there's no way Ican be my best at it. So it
should go out automatically.
Because I, you know, I don'tknow how you play, but I try to
play to be best in the world atthings, right? If I can't be
best in the world world atsomething or try to invest in
the world at something. I'm notgoing to get into it. I'm going
to say no. So I that's somethingmore on a personal level. To do

(43:30):
that, but like I do think thathow to know when to walk away
from a project is one of thevery complicated, cool,
interesting, difficult businessand life questions that I don't
I don't think we're 100% thereyet. I really don't like it's
like, you guys are asking greatquestions. And I wish I was

(43:53):
smarter than I am. I've taken itas far as I can. But you know,
you're smart. After reading guysare asking hard questions.

Leon Goren (44:01):
Thank you. I think I agree with you. I think you
talked from a personalperspective, I think about
corporate strategy match, right?
Where you have the huge bags ofthe top goals that are laid
down. It's a one pager and wefilter ideas through that all
the time. If it doesn't fitwithin the boxes in terms of
direction where you're going,you can inquire you can ask
questions around it, but that'sone of the that's how I actually

(44:24):
filter stuff to make sure thateveryone is aligned driving
towards a similar goal.
Personally could do the samething changing corporate
strategy into a life GPS, whichis a model moving forward. See
me another question. Somebodyasked me ask you this. They're
on the treadmill. So I thinkHere we go. I think one of the
most overlooked energy issues isin in order amount of time we

(44:47):
spend using our precious mentalenergy on non priorities. We
always think in terms of energyuse in physical activities and
not mental, the most productiveand fulfilled people I know are
masters of picking spots to youIs there mental energy in
controlling their mental,emotional state? and thoughts?
Can you perhaps comment on that?
or? Yeah, I

Steven Kotler (45:07):
mean, yeah, I like it, you nailed something
really foundational, which is,people think physical energy is,
you know, more work than mentalenergy. And it's not, your brain
uses 25% of your energy at rest,it's 2% of your body mass 25% of

(45:30):
your energy at rest, if you'refocused and paying attention,
especially if you're payingattention to something that
you're, it's difficult, it'shard to pay attention to that
requires, I think, where there'smore stress, you're using a huge
amount of energy, the level ofstupid I am after an entire day
spent writing, or in meetings,versus the level of stupid I am

(45:51):
after an entire day spentskiing, or, you know, riding my
bike, I'm way stupid, or afterthe cognitive stuff, just
there's no way there's no wayaround. It burns way more energy
most of the time. Unless you're,you know, if your friend on the
treadmill is trying to put in,you know, four minute, five
minute miles, okay, you may bewinning, you may be burning more

(46:12):
energy than that I am right nowtalking to you guys. But it's
doubtful.

Unknown (46:19):
That's great. Question.

Steven Kotler (46:23):
By the way, hold on, let me copy out there. Two
things I want to mention aboutthis. This is also why across
the boards, we see that you needseven, eight hours a night of
sleep at night for peakperformance. No questions asked.
Sorry, I seem to have noworries.

Leon Goren (46:44):
Take your time.

Steven Kotler (46:48):
Yeah, I'm gonna start coughing and get but we'll
just play through. And youshould also have an active
recovery protocol in place. Sodon't finish to work and
television, a beer, not activerecovery. That's a passive
requiring protocol that we thinkactually helps us recover and

(47:11):
doesn't involve alcohol. If youhave more than two cocktails,
it's going to screw up yoursleep patterns. It's going to
rob you of this sleep, you needtelevision. Because of how it
affects our brainwaves. It makesus feel like we're relaxing. But
the brain is actually not reallyrelaxing. The brain reacts to
television, as if there was acrisis almost every 30 seconds,

(47:32):
you don't feel it at all. But ata break, we can you can see it
in brainwaves. That's notrecovery, to actually recover at
the end of a long, hard workday, when you're kind of
depleted on what the researchshows is. You want something
that will lower automaticallylower cortisol and

(47:53):
norepinephrine levels and bodyso flush out stress hormones,
and alter brainwaves thatdropped brainwaves from where
they are high beta is where weare right now it's a fast moving
wave. It's awake, alert, payingattention down to alpha Daydream
much slower, that's what thebrain needs to reset. So how do
you do that? Epsom salt baths,restorative yoga. So this is not

(48:14):
yoga for exercise. This is yogalike stretching and calm with
breathing, focus, meditationpractice of any kind. exercise
can sometimes help those it'sgardening or like a long walk,
but a restorative practice atthe end of your day that changes
brainwaves and helps flushstress hormones out of your

(48:34):
system. One, it's part, if youdon't have it on, you will
probably you're much more likelyto burn out. In fact, there's a
lot of work that we've done inthe flow research collective
that says if you have regularaccess to flow through what's
known as your primary flowactivity, and we'll come back to
that for a second. And in activerecovery protocol in place, and

(48:57):
you're getting seven to eighthours of sleep at night, it's
almost impossible to burnout.
You can do it if you are in abeautiful boss who's super
passive aggressive, who keepsmoving the goalposts or a spouse
or a situation where like, youcan't please somebody and they
that that situation, get out ofit, you just you're gonna burn
out no matter what. That's all.

(49:17):
It's automatic. There's nothingyou can do to win situations,
just get the hell out of thatsituation. But primary flow
activity is whatever that thingis that you've done your whole
life that drops from the flow.
For me, it's skiing. For otherpeople, it's walking their dog
and in nature or playing chessor dancing to salsa dancing, hip
hop, or, you know, reading ordoesn't matter. Take your pick.

(49:37):
These are all the things that bythe way we put down in
adulthood, what's the firstthing we become adults, we're
responsible, we have families,we have jobs, we put away
childish things. I'm puttingaway the surfboard or the
skateboard or the whatever. Andit's actually a disaster for
performance for a bunch ofdifferent reasons. One is as we
move into flow, there's a Thestress hormones are pushed

(50:00):
forcefully out of our system andhappens automatically replaced
by feel good performanceenhancing neuro chemicals that
also boost the immune system. Soin a time COVID primary flow
activities really matter becauseyou're doing some good things
for that. Also, the more flowyou get, the more flow you get.
So if you get flow skiing onMonday, you're training the
brain to focus in a particularway, you're gonna get more flow
at work on Tuesday, and theheightened productivity and

(50:23):
heightened creativity. Soproductivity 500% above baseline
creativity is 407% abovebaseline that seems to outlast
the flow state by a day, maybetwo. So great reasons to double
down on your primary flowactivity. But if you're fighting
burnout, primary flow activity,if you can, an afternoon week is
best, but even 10 minutes, youknow, here and there is great,

(50:43):
but like three or four hours aweek is best, but that plus
seven, eight hours of sleep anight plus like an active
recovery protocol. So 10 minutesof focused meditation at the end
of the day, or a 20 minuteInfrared Sauna or 15 minute yoga
practice seems to block burnout,

Leon Goren (51:04):
even as this related to sin is one of the questions
they're gonna ask you. Becausein sports, when you train for
that one big achievement, youtrain really hard to achieve
that you get that flow you getin the moment, you flow through
the whole process. But when youdo break that record, whatever
it is that you achieve, you findthat people get depressed, like
you go through a lull. And it'snot allowed just for a day or

(51:26):
two. Like I actually, personallyI'll find this if I work hard.
Two days later, I'm actuallydrawing big time. Big Event
dropped down for months, and wesee that mental illness with a
lot of athletes. I gotta putthat in the context of today,
we've been battling COVID fornine to 10 months, right? As
soon as it's done, and we'vegotten through this thing. Well,

(51:49):
you know, mental health is goingto be an issue is this Yeah,
recovery process?

Steven Kotler (51:53):
We can Yeah, it's a really good point. So really
good point you just made becauseI've been saying this all along,
we've been you one of the thingsabout about flow is
neurobiologically. Evolution, Ithink this is the brain reacting
to crisis situations. That's whythey evolve. So flow is sort of
cost this work is customdesigned for COVID. So I've been
doing we've been doing a lot ofhardcore, serious work with
individuals and organizationsaround this very question. And

(52:14):
yeah, you're totally right. Sothe thing is COVID itself is
creating preconditions that areleading to stress, overwork and
exhaustion, and what's going tohappen as we all know, this
disease is going to go away,it's going to go back to
business as normal and yousuddenly we're going to the
world is going to change andwhat there's going to be a great

(52:37):
time to make a lot of money,great time to be in business.
But what if you're burned out bythe time COVID ends up I mean,
if you've ever been burned outbefore mental performance
suffers it at a significantsignificant level. So we have
told people during COVID doubledthat you want to double down on
your primary flow activity, youractive recovery protocol. And

(53:00):
what I said earlier thatpositive psychology is three
great ways to sort of manageanxiety in any day, write a
daily gratitude practice, adaily mindfulness practice or
regular exercise, 2040 minutes aday, usually normal situations
when we tell people's pick one aday, write gratitude practice
takes five minutes, 10 minutes,over 11 minutes of focus,

(53:20):
respiration, meditation, or 20minutes of exercise, exercising
until it's quiet upstairs, whichis how you get the kind of
mental health benefits duringtimes of crisis, to these things
a day or three of these things aday, depending on how hot your
system is running. So you wantto do that on the front end, you
want to get seven, eight hoursof sleep a night you want
regular access to flow, you wantan active recovery protocol in

(53:41):
place. And if you're doing allfour of those things, burnout is
almost impossible. And then whenit is time to get back to work,
you will be really ready for it.

Leon Goren (53:51):
So with the exercise, and I think you refer
to the book as well, you talkedabout light exercise, and we're
talking to the average personhere. Mentally We're in the
business world, we're notprofessional athletes. Is it
light exercise, or is it hardexercise?

Steven Kotler (54:05):
Well, it depends if you're trying to if you're
trying to train grit, that'shard or exercise, right if they
if you're working on gritskills, but if you're cognitive
fitness, you can a 2025 minutewalk you literally like you're
going to exercise until andlightly until it gets quiet
upstairs, two things are gonnahappen it's gonna get quiet

(54:26):
upstairs, the voice in your headis going to get quieter and your
lungs are gonna open up, you'llfill your lungs open up what
those what those both reflect isa release of nitric oxide. It's
a gaseous signaling molecule.
It's in every cell in the bodybasically. And as an as as you
kind of get to what's known asexercise induced transient

(54:46):
hypofrontality means theprefrontal cortex D activates
the part of your brain that'sworrying and thinking all the
time. It shuts down starts toshut that depends on your
fitness level. If you're not fitat all. You can use the Get
there with 2025 minutes ofwalking, right? slight uphill,
slight, slight, slight uphill,usually is more than enough, you
know, depends on your fitnesslevel. For me, you know, I have

(55:10):
to ski really hard for about 90minutes to get there. That's
what it takes. But, you know, Irun around with professional
athletes when I'm not, you know,doing this breaking bottle my
frickin No, no, we're donebreaking bones, there's no more
that I put down childish things,at least, you know. Okay, that's

(55:32):
not true. My shoulders separatedright now, but whatever.

Leon Goren (55:40):
You know, it's been great. I know, the questions are
rolling over. I'm respectingeverybody's time. I promised
that we'd ended up noon here.
Steve, could you maybe leave usyou got a sense of the audience
got a bunch of questions, ifthey're the three things that
you could leave with what weleave us with at the end of
today's session that we shouldthink about even slightly start
to move us towards doing this.
Because, you know, I read yourbook, I read through the

(56:03):
activities at the end, we're allcapable of doing this, the most
of us will start and we're goingto fall off the wagon within a
month or two. It's, it's funnyhow. And it's not like any
technology. This is just hardstuff to actually do. You've
simplified it. But it is hard toactually get motivated to do
this stuff.

Steven Kotler (56:22):
I don't I it's funny, I think it's only hard to
get motivated to this stuffuntil you start seeing the
results. And the results are sospectacular. Right? It's I mean,
it is amazing what happens,right? When you when we're
seeing I'll give you an example.
We at the flow researchcollective right, our training
our course fundamental trainingis zero to dangerous. We see on

(56:43):
the back end of is eight weekslong, it's hard as hell, don't
kid yourself, right. But we seea 70 to 80% boost in flow on the
back end, this stuff isamazingly easy to train, because
it's our biology, and it'sdesigned to work this way. So
you can get spectacular results.
And as those results right. Now,getting to the point that point,

(57:08):
you're not wrong. And sonormally, by the way, later on,
when people ask me, what are thethree things I can do Monday
morning? My answer is always thesame. Fuck off. Like, that's a
ridiculous question. Like Idon't whatever it is that you do
for a living? Can you tell mehow to be great at it with? What
are the three things thatallowed me to be great at your
job? Right? That's a sillyquestion to silly question

(57:28):
anywhere. That said, that said,I'm still gonna help you out a
little bit.

Leon Goren (57:32):
It's not to do I'm thinking about

Steven Kotler (57:34):
behaviors. So what we have found is this, if
you're really interested inmoving the needle, on one of the
greatest places to start is withthree simple activities, I'm not
going to go into too much detailon on how to do them, because in
the art impossible, and we'rerunning out of time. But first
double down on your primary flowactivity. We talked about this a

(57:55):
lot today. It's reallycounterintuitive, but the
results are really significant.
So start there. The second thingis, flow follows focus flow has
triggers what all the triggersdo is they drive attention to
the present moment. So theeasiest place to start is with
focus itself. With the researchshows if you want to maximize
flow, try to start your periodyour day with a period of

(58:19):
uninterrupted concentrationdevoted to your hardest task.
Now, start your workday. If youare a extreme Lark, like me, you
get up really early. That meansyou do it at four o'clock in the
morning, because that's whenyour circadian rhythms that
you're most awake. If you're anormal person, and you're like
most awake at 9am, that's whenyou do it. And if you're a night

(58:40):
owl, like my wife, you want tostart at like four or five
o'clock in the evening. Justwant to match your circadian
rhythm with a with a period foruninterrupted concentration.
prior to getting into thatperiod, practice distraction
management ahead of time. Don'ttry to resist temptation in the
moment. What are you kiddingmore human beings, we don't
resist temptation. We give intotemptation. That's what it means

(59:00):
to be human as far as I cantell. So phones get shut off,
email gets shut off, Facebook,Twitter, instant messages, all
those alerts you've got turnthem all off at a time so you're
not even tempted. And what theresearch shows is what you want
to aim for. Now start withwhatever you want to start with,
right? If you've got 20 minutestoday, that's what you start
with. If you got 25 tomorrow,that's what you start with. But

(59:22):
what you want to aim for overtime is a 90 minute block fun
interrupted concentration,because that's how long the
brain is designed to naturallyfocus. We have 90 minute REM
cycles, right? We all know this.
We go into REM sleep, we dreamfor 90 minutes and then we come
out. Same thing we have wakingcycles, and they're $90.20
minutes long. So put this incontext and give it familiar

(59:46):
Montessori education, Waldorfeducation Montessori especially
when they went looking for thehighest flow activities on
Earth. Montessori education isalways very near the top. One of
the reasons Montessori kidsoutperformed Waldorf Kids
outperform other kids on prettymuch every test you can give
them. The amount of flow flowamplifies learning massively
Montessori works really wellthat way. Why does Montessori

(01:00:08):
produce so much flow? One of thereasons is built around 920
minute uninterrupted periods ofconcentration. They train the
kids from four years old age tofocus for that long. And the
kids learn it really easily.
Because your brain is actuallyyou know how frickin add kids
seem to you. But once you starttraining it, human brain is

(01:00:28):
built to focus for 90 minutes ata time. So it becomes remarkably
easy over time. So distractionmanagement on the front end, 90
minutes or uninterruptedconcentration, double down on
your primary flow activity,active recovery protocols seven,
eight hours of sleep a night.
Now you're cooking with fire.

Leon Goren (01:00:49):
Not such a silly question. I love it. Well,

Steven Kotler (01:00:52):
the reason it's silly is because it's three
things to do Monday, Tuesday,Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,
Saturday, Sunday repeat. Right?
performance works like compoundinterest. That's like right.

Leon Goren (01:01:02):
I love it. Steven, I want to thank you. Listen, all
of you that joined us today.
Obviously, there's somethingthat piques your curiosity to
come and join them to listen toStevens, you've taken actually
one of the first steps thesecond step I'd say is pick up
his book because, I mean, Steventouched on a few things, but we
didn't get to talk aboutlearning, reading How important
is we didn't talk aboutcreativity, you know, moving

(01:01:23):
from one winner idea to multipleand creating sustainable
creativity. Just some greatadvice in there, Stephen and
you've done incredible researchon it. I'd urge you all really
to pick up that book. Again,thank you for all joining us.
Thank you Steven. If you'reinterested in another wave
forward live webcast pleasevisit us at p OE dash leadership

(01:01:43):
comm you'll find a number ofrecorded past past webcasts and
podcasts I've included ProfessorRosa Beth Kanter, Professor Miko
beer, both from Harvard JoeJackman, Harry Kramer, Dr. Greg
wells, Dr. Jason cell, Michelgoldheart. The list goes on. In
the months ahead. We have someincredible thought leaders
joining us including Morganhousel, Kim Scott, Janice Stein,

(01:02:03):
Erica Dhawan, in naming a few.
It's an incredibly excitinglineup, be sure to join us. And
please spread the word. And ifyou're interested, happy to
introduce you to what anadvisory board could look like.
Send me an email. Until we meetagain, I'd like to wish you all
a fantastic day and a wonderfulmonth of March. Don't

(01:02:25):
underestimate your potential andThink Big thanks very much.

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