 Welcome to the show Steven thanks for having me guys. Good to be with you Yeah, we're so excited to dig into your latest book on peak performance and as we get started here I'd love to learn what piqued your interest in peak performance and how you started researching and developing out the book This book is it goes back all the way to the beginning of my career And I started out as a journalist covering Both science neuroscience and psychology in the topics that I've read written about for years And action sports and action sports in the 90s was this era of impossible right more impossible feats were being done Than ever before we'd never seen anything like it and you know There's a quote from Jeremy Jones in our impossible or he says you know It was literally like stuff that was impossible in the morning was possible by evening and the rules were like Rules that had been set up since the beginning of action sports like don't ever do this or you'll die We're changing on an hourly basis and that caught my attention, right? It just demands an explanation and and more so one first of all these were friends of mine Right. These were like so it's it's one thing when people are doing impossible things and you see it from a distance It's another thing when you're like drinking with the dude in a bar on Monday night and on Tuesday they do something that's never been done in the history of the world and but more importantly The athletes I knew in this world very few of them had much education They didn't have any money. They came from very difficult backgrounds a lot of them This is a group and there are lots of drugs. There was lots of wildness This was a group of people that if you were to like draw them out on paper and say What are the chances of like, you know living through the year let alone redefining what's possible for our species You wouldn't bet on them is my point and I want to know how is this possible How is this possible for this group of people? And then that question led into every other domain how I went from Action sports right into at a list of 30 different sci-fi technologies Sci-fi ideas and I was in the room when most of them, you know became science fact And I how did that happen? This is impossible stuff. You dreamed up the future, right? You this was a blind man And something he can see right the world's art of first artificial vision In plant gets turned on which is technically a biblical miracle, right? It's not even an impossible. It's a biblical miracle and And it's it started out after Looking at this in dozens and dozens and dozens of domains and tens of thousands of people and really working on the neuroscience along the way There are commonalities a lot of commonalities and Really smart people have been on your show to talk about focus or mindfulness or gratitude Or flow or different pieces of the puzzle But what has happened now is we've the science has gotten far enough that we see the whole picture Like oh my god It's one whole system It's designed to work together in a specific order in a very specific way and anybody can use it And if you actually start working with it this way You know the moral of the story I think after 30 years of looking at this long answer You're very short question that I just abused this shit out of is uh If there's one if I sum up what I learned over 30 years, it's that we are all hardwired for the extraordinary That's the evidence over and over and over again. Nobody I met started out as an extraordinary person They just didn't and I've met More people who have done the accomplished the impossible that probably anybody else alive And none of them started out extraordinary. They all became extraordinary by following actually very similar processes So that's the sort of the big the big lesson But it started the action sports and started um, and I've had the pleasure today of just being on the phone with a handful of people From my past So it's been really fun and we were talking about what it looked like Back before we knew what was possible now. We're sort of like. Oh, yeah We've seen people jump 300 feet on a snowboard But there was a period of time in 1994 We're the best in the world will tell you that no human body can survive more than 70 feet off a cliff You can't do it and that was right and now we're over 300. So, you know, it's that kind of stuff I want to bring you back a bit to the action sports thing because I am 47 and I grew up Skateboarding and I grew up skateboarding during the 90s when it had an explosion Along with all the other action sports and that wave there was also something else that you missed in there And I'm sure we'll get to this There was a self-expression that was involved in that that that We have not seen before and it come out in sports Where these folks have taken this passion Of of and also in the 90s We had enough technology where we could look back and see the beginnings of skateboards and surfboards And their humble beginnings and pushing them forward to be able to do what they did So we had a hand in advancing this idea And while we were advancing it for all the boomers that were around us our parents were like, oh, I remember skateboards Like you don't remember them the way we are going to remember them and making them something that was Extraordinary and by tapping into that That very thing of taking something like a skateboard and making it extraordinary Translated it to every other area in my life. And I think that is something that separates Gen X from their from our parents But also is able to now now we see it in technology. We see it in instagram We see it in twitter where people are now taking these humble seeds Of these ideas and blowing them up to extraordinary Expression and so in reading your book I had picked that up and I was really looking forward to this conversation today to to venture into somebody's evidence You there's two points here that are there so i'm going to mention them both and then we're going to go into both They're both excellent. They go in different directions um one thing that you talked about is You know, I always sort of casually introduced myself as an old school punk rocker And it's funny because most people hear that and they think oh punk rock anarchy. They don't and I'm like no no no This was diy This was self expression do it you're like right so that it's a totally different thing and there was you know There was an anarchy wave, but there was also a different wave But the more important point is The bulk of my work is on the science of flow right the state the optimal state of consciousness And flow states have triggers And this was the biggest you nailed the biggest deal about the action sport athletes in the 90s creativity Pattern recognition the linking of ideas together is a very powerful flow trigger right it releases a little bit of dopamine dopamine drives focus You drive focus enough into the present moment You have flow and that was the big deal in action sports What happened in the 90s is one they started living in such a way action sports communities started developing right So you essentially got action sports skunk works and skunk works in general are built around foundational flow trigger principles And you so you had that in the communities, but the value shifted and that was the big deal Up to that moment in time fastest manner woman to the bottom won and suddenly it was Most creative line to the bottom most creative way to interface with the wave most creative way to interface with the sidewalk That was what made you a winner and it massively Spirited up the amount of flow which essentially turbo boosted everything and that to me everything And we talk about that in the book right? I always think about the action sport athletes They made creativity their core value. It was the center of everything right? They believed and It was also a fairly unique form of creativity I've come to realize meaning when you talk to older younger generations now We were our generation was very distrustful of fame of celebrity of power Of commerce of a lot of stuff like that And so I like I have to educate my staff these days people who are a lot younger than me I'm like just because they're famous doesn't mean they're right Right like there's a there's a big difference here Nobody in my generation would ever assume that you're right because you're famous or powerful or rich You would most likely distrust you and then you'd have to earn that trust if you came out of that world I want to bring back this this icon for all extreme sports And this is leads into where you say where this creativity got hit And then it blew up into sort of a fame and a power and and its own self-destruction And I think You're talking about tody alva in other words Well, no, I'm going before that. I'm going with evil can evil So he had taken Motorcycle and was the first action sports hero And and to and bring tony alva into this they had taken that same spirit as children watching evil can evil On motorbikes and they took that same attitude and creativity to The sports that they had around them surfing and skateboarding it was that same energy and excitement that surrounded Evil can evil that they wanted for themselves as young people and they found it In the toys around them. You're totally right and emphasis on your point I was part of you know, there were hotbeds for action sports Squaw Valley was one of them and I was part of the tahoe community in the 90s And there was another community in Jackson Hole and Jackson Hole. They were mountain men They were very serious and they were amazing badass athletes who pioneered all of alaska But the squaw valley tahoe contingent led by shane mcconkey influenced by evil can evil the whole point was Make be do the most badass thing in the world and make fun of yourself along the way Right. Yeah, it was sort of that was that evil can evil spirit We saw a lot of people in costumes, right the same kind of costumes. He was wearing squaw valley community They called it podium gear, right? Everybody had to have their evil can evil like costume when you won the x games or whatever in the early days So there was a direct carryover from that lineage. You're totally right Well, I want to touch on this idea of flow state and the connectedness of this community because you know, I remember Watching documentaries now around this exact time period where skaters would see one skater pull off a trick and immediately It would pop in their mind another way that they could tweak that to make it their own But no one had thought of this before So how does this flow state in the community work because we've heard about flow state on a personal level But how does it all interconnect? You're asking a very cutting edge. The answer is we don't know the the truth I'm gonna fumble around here for a little bit because I talk a lot and it's a fun question But like the real answer is we don't have a fucking clue But um flow is Very very involved in all kind of all aspects of community bonding Right most kind of if you think about Things that bond communities that are really like blue color level concerts Football games those all these are experiences of communitas. That's group flow at scale Right, so you can have individual flow me and a flow state You could have group flow it could be interpersonal flow me and you we're one-on-one talking Or it could be the three of us group flow There's team flow, which is a slightly different thing We're not going to go there and then you can go up and scale the communitas Which is when you get it at a cultural level and obviously experiences of communitas and You know the people were writing about flow and the power and community So the earliest in in sort of the western canon That we find flow is niche And the term was originally great It's gertha who coined it Roush was the german term for flow, but it was to describe like Dionysian cultural it really got drunk It was like early october fest right or burning man meets october fest and they needed a term to describe that And they came up with roush this overflowing a flowing joy that sweeps up Right the crowd and um, it was a core part of kind of Nietzsche's philosophy in terms of self-improvement and things along those lines And it just carried forward if the problem with The cutting edge of flow research is on this stuff The problem is it's hard enough to try to measure flow in an individual But trying to measure flow in a in a group at once like where our technology just isn't there yet But it's getting there And um, and we're getting closer, you know what? I might a flow research collective my organization is working on a biophysical based flow detector So something they can measure up neurological signals and physiological signals and tell are you in flow or not? And hopefully what you can do to get deeper into flow or to get into flow if you're not We think we're three to five years away from that And we're not the only group working on it right like in fact a couple guys on my board are actually even competing against us They have a different version of the same kind of thing and to me it's the more the merrier I just want to solve the puzzle so I don't I don't really care who solves it Let's just solve the puzzle but group flow is sort of on the way And there's a couple groups who are have been really looking hard at can you precipitate group flow? Can you use technology and they're starting to ask questions about measuring it? And I don't know how far along they are. I've conducted those guys in about six months Well, I I know that I've experienced it myself strapped on a snowboard Very elusive quality for me outside of that don't consider myself creative more analytical And we haven't really talked as much about flow on on this show in particular because it's certainly not our expertise But I would love to at least unpack on the individual level what the science shows and how our audience who Maybe isn't in an action sport can work to start to tap into a flow state We started there and I look I'll I'll gap about action sports all day long because I've got a background there But the point really is that flow is actually fairly common in action sports But it shows up people spend on average Fibrous in their work life and flow often without even realizing it the big telling detail for people what sort of unlocks the mystery is Flow is a spectrum experience. It's like any emotion anger. You can be a little irked You could be homicidally murderous. It's the same emotion different ends of a spectrum. So flow is Psychologically defined by there are six core characteristics phenomenological. How does the state make you feel? characteristics and Complete concentration in the present moment Time dilation would mean time passes strangely speeds up or slows down You'll get a diminishment of self consciousness self awareness and awareness certain non critical bodily functions In other words, you don't notice you have to go to the bathroom when you're in flow, right? There's a sense of control. There's a Heightens has a pleasure and enjoyment what's known as an autotelic experience meaning an end in the self It means once an experience produces flow We go really far out of our way to get more of it So when those experiences are showed up when all six are present we call that experience flow They can be they can all show up and be dialed down to like One or two and this is experience. We've all had you sit down to write a quick email You get sucked in and you'll look up an hour later You've written an essay and maybe your sense of self didn't vanish But you have to go to the bathroom and you just you're like, oh god I got I got to take a pee right and you had no idea time was passing that happens to all of us all the time That's a micro flow state The opposite end of the spectrum is what you're talking about which is much more common in action sports among other things Say macro flow state macro flow is such a peculiar powerful weird experience that we thought it was a We meaning the scientific community thought it was a mystical experience until like the 1940s or 50s It was a psychologist Abraham Maslow who found flow is kind of a core trait among a group of Extremely high achievers he was studying Not just successful people but people who had really great moral lives and we're had a lot of meaning and purpose in their life That's he didn't mean high achievement the way we do And scotbury coppin is is on my staff and when I missed to find anything but maslow He yells at me and so I don't want to get my maslow wrong because i'm tired of getting yelled at um But uh, yeah, so it macro flow is you know, it's often described as a full low mystical experience and we now you know when we could talk about this obviously moving forward But we understand the out-of-body experience has happened in flow. For example sometimes, you know deep flow states We now know why we know what in the brain is causing that we know all Why does self go away? Why does time pass strangely all these really so-called mystical qualities? We now understand the neurobiology. That doesn't make them any less Emotionally powerful, you know what? I mean, they're not any less mystical Just because we understand where they come from and I always say people on one side of the argument They love the fact that there's biology underneath so-called spiritual experience. I'm like look this proves nothing It doesn't like if there's a god it means god talks to us through a biology If there's not a god that it means the biology works and for some reason these kinds of experiences are useful for us It's one or the other but it doesn't settle the discussion the argument at all So i'm not taking a position on on a theological position one way or the other on this and this myth of the 10 percent of our brain in use We we hear it all the time. It's such commonly used term Can you help us debunk that? Yeah, so the debunking is really funny because it's a william james of founding of founding father psychology He made the statement and then andrew karnagy and they can grow rich or dale karnagy and they can grow rich Misinterpreted what james wrote Thus we get the 10 percent brain myth which is the idea that we're only using a small portion of our brain any one time So peak performance a k flow, especially it must be the full brain and overdrive and it turns out as You're smiling about it. We had it exactly backwards, right in flow in our state of peak performance We're not using more of the brain. We're actually using less of the brain The technical term is uh hypo frontality Hypo is the opposite of means of hyper it means to deactivate to shut down and frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex Part of the brain that's right back here We used to think five six years ago that it was this whole portion of the brain that deactivated Now we believe it's a more localized deactivation depending on what you're doing At the time but needless to say why does time pass so strangely in flow, right? Why does time slow down and get a freeze for of effect or why does it speed up? Well, because time is this network that's processed by a bunch of different structures and prefrontal cortex And like any network the nodes start to shut down the whole thing collapses We lose the ability to separate past from present from future now It turns out that has enormous performance benefits for everybody not just for actions for athletes This simple thing here is anxiety as we all know is an enormous break on performance right the one of the main destroyers of performance anxiety and fear and Most of our fears Are either scary shit that happened in the past we'd like to avoid from the present Or it's horrible stuff that might maybe just you know could happen in the future and we want to steer around So if I remove past and future as options in your brain You're plunged into what you know psychologists talk about as the deep now Or the elongated now sometimes or you're poetically the eternal present, right? Either way It means that our time processing is all screwed up. But as a result Because all this anxiety plummet stress hormones get flushed out of our system, right as we move into flow You see you see all the stress hormones Get lower down in our system say they happen to our sense of self Self is another construction. It's the prefrontal cortex working with deeper parts of the brain But when the prefrontal cortex goes down You lose your ability to create your sense of self. What's the bonus here? Your inner critic that nagging always on defeatist voice in your head, right for the older folks in the crowd Your inner woody ellen right woody goes silent in flow Right and that's that's a big deal as a result risk taking goes way up creativity goes way up innovation Goes way up often productivity goes way up, right because you're no longer Doubting every idea you have you're no longer second-guessing yourself. So all these things are massively increased We're literally neurobiologically getting out of our own way Which I love so Stephen one of the the things that I was thinking about with this and even it's speaking about it In this conversation it brings it brings me to this point Are we doing Damage to our young children by not sticking them outside and telling them to go busy themselves Rather than being in front of a screen We're like being outside using that imagination starts to open up pathways that will help Children learn how to get in flow and fill flow Where if they're having this technology, they're not using these aspects. There's these parts of the brain They're actually hindering the development Of the brain in in those areas and from the research that I've been seeing It seems to me that those parts of the brain are not developing And that makes me worried About the future. I always tell people I Have expert knowledge around flow and learning and flow and education. I have zero knowledge around children I try very hard to stay in my lane. I don't have children. I don't really like children I don't like your children. I sometimes I don't like people who have children No, but my point is I have a lot of people on my staff who do have children Even though I've tried to talk them out of it But uh, I'm cautious as I approach a question because I like I I like to know what I'm talking about before I answer it but what I will what I can speak to is certainly we evolved in certain kinds of environments and the evidence is overwhelming That access to nature is important for optimism is important for a good mood. It's in fact, by the way, it's When you have when you are looking at a wide vista As you get in nature if you're looking at a mountain range peripheral vision When we when we look out the corners of our eyes It calms us down automatically. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system and it makes us more creative And uh for for a number of different reasons. So there's there is actual Real I I can't speak to children and what we should be doing in schools, right? I don't like that's just not an area I'm comfortable extending myself in but like should everybody be doing this children and adults Yeah, I mean like, you know, all you need to know is a 20 minute walk in the woods outperforms all the ssri's on the market That right plus the fact that it enhances creativity Plus the fact that it enhances quality of life plus the fact that it enhances mood In my experience Peak performers any field doesn't matter what you demand you're in are too busy to solve problems one at a time You look for multi-tool solutions. You want a solution that will solve six or seven problems at once because you're too busy Going outside Is a huge multi-tool solution You can write you got exercise benefits there. You've got enhanced creativity benefits there You've got to enhance mood Benefit there you probably are going to enhance innovation. We know Novelty complexity unpredictability, which are three things that are built into the natural world. These are all flow triggers So you're going to get an increased amount of flow and we could like we can go on and on right like this is I'm stopping from but I could I could really do this for like the next 10 minutes in terms of the psychological and physiological benefits of being in nature a little bit and I also say You know, I think there is though. This is not in the book and I'm not advising anybody to do this But at a personal level I like those no longer at the top of the food chain moments that you sometimes have in nature Right where whether it's you know doing something, you know Access sports wise where you're really playing with primal forces gravity things like that or you know I can't tell you how many times I've been hiking a trail turn to corner and there's a bear or there's a mountain lion Or there's an ocelot or right. I'm depending on which country I'm in or you know, there's a cobra Like there's something about when you have that that kind of encounter that paints all your day to day problems like go back to your argument with your wife and You know what? I mean your problem at work after you bumped into a bear or a cobra and perspective is something you suddenly have Right, like it's really I find that very very useful And I think for a lot of people who sort of choose to live their their life in that way They would agree with me. I don't think this is something normal people want anything to do with it I'm not you don't need to do this to perform for your best But I do think it's a not disclos discussed benefit of nature Which is sometimes being in the face of overwhelming power is awesome. It's an amazingly good thing Now I want to talk about these flow triggers because obviously action sports is one domain Probably not many in our audience are engaging in action sports Many people in our audience are struggling a little bit with some social anxiety Frustrated that they can't get in flow with conversations with people and important job interviews are on a great first date We've all had those moments where we've we've instantly connected with someone time has disappeared and all of a sudden You can't believe the conversation ended How can we create those flow triggers or look for those flow triggers to create that State where we lower our anxiety and we allow ourselves to fully feel it. So There are 22 known flow triggers And the first thing we place we want to start is the simplest flow follows focus It only shows up when all of our attention is on the right here right now So that's what all the triggers do they drive attention into the present moment? If I were to put this neuro biologically, they do one of three things They either drive nor up an effort into our system, which is a neurochemical They drive dopamine into our system another neurochemical. They're the lower cognitive load Among the functions that dope mean and nor up an effort plane Perform is focused. They massively enhance Attention and so for example, if I put a little bit of nor up an effort in dopamine into your system That's the cocktail underneath curiosity. If I crank it up a lot more. That's passion Right, think about how much attention you paid anybody you've ever fallen in love with for free You didn't have to spend any work. You just couldn't stop looking at them, right? That's so um, that's what you get from nor up an effort and dopamine and Cognitive load is all the crap you're trying to think about any one time And if I lower cognitive load I liberate a tremendous amount of energy that can be repurposed for the present moment Attention, so that's what all the triggers do There are 12 on the individual side that'll get me into flow or you into flow and then there are 12 or 10 on the group side and there there's a lot of overlap between them and You're asking sort of group flow triggers So first off credit where credit is due I did none of the research into group flows triggers It was all done by a very brilliant psychologist named Keith Sawyer. He's the University of North Carolina And he actually did all this work This is not an art impossible. I think the story's in a different book of mine. It was an improv jazz player He was studying with me high chicks at me high the godfather flow psychology at the University of Chicago It was a jazz musician and he started to notice jazz musicians would get into these group flow experiences And he wanted to study it more and he teamed up with second city television Which is the improv theater troupe comedy troupe that feeds into Saturday live and a whole bunch of other stuff like that Has for years and for 15 years. He was their jazz musician he would like accompany their performances on the piano and film them and did frame by frame analysis is basically like He could tell when the performers were in group flow Because the level of audience laughter went through the roof Right like the performance Okay, everybody came together everybody's laughing so you can check for that on the like soundtrack and say, okay The hell was going on and he like went frame by frame for 15 years and he came up with these 10 triggers so this what you're looking for are those group flow triggers and You'll notice that a lot of what i'm going to talk about it's going to sound like stuff You probably had on the show because it's going to sound like stuff that could would be covered under Psychological safety for example, right? There's a there's a tremendous amount of overlap between the group flow triggers psychological safety And in fact, I think the psychological safety discussion would be more informed if they understood group flow triggers Because there's a couple things in the psychological the safety discussion That you want because it makes people feel safe and secure and it's important But it actually could block good team performance So we haven't yet negotiated some of this stuff and some of it's like really obvious stuff when you're building a team right you want people of equal skill levels Roughly for the simple reason that you know, if you're going to play basketball There's five guys on the team and your point guards never played before and your power forward is Carl Malone, you've got a problem, right? That's not Carl's not going to be in flow and the poor right, you know Or for those of you who aren't as old as me. I'm trying to think of a power forward Of I just I I was reaching into the February banks. I don't know why We'll go with LeBron for the the younger audience I was going for Draymont. That's what I was getting stuck at. I couldn't come up with the the second half of his name Like dre dre dre. What's his name dre? We want equal level of skill you need familiarity for example on that means like I understand your ticks your 10 sees Your language right you need common language These are really important things, but the most important group flows triggers Is yes and which is the first rule of improv, right? If right if you come up to me and you're like, yo, steven There's a blue elephant in the bathroom and I go shut up. No, there's not That's not funny. It's not stories going nowhere. But if I say, oh crap I hope he's not using up all the toilet paper. I really got to go Right now we can sort of roll into something that's even mildly amusing. Um, at least in my head But uh, my point is and this doesn't by the way mean Because if you're familiar with the science of brainstorming, you know that like Just loving everybody's idea and going kumbaya is a lousy way that gives you group thing It doesn't give you innovation, right? So yes, hand is not about like Kissing everybody's butt. It's about finding something in the an idea that you can be additive to I can say well, you know Almost everything you said I'm not really down with But the thing you had about Marshall amplifiers and fuzzy headed purple dowels. I am really into that that that's going to go somewhere Right, you you can do it that way. So um, and I also I just want to say this because I didn't Get to say it earlier There's a lot of analytical flow. It is a misnomer that flow When chmihi chicks set me high was the godfather flow research started doing this work He was trying to figure out What life it why why life is meaningful and he was studying People in leisure activities. So he was looking at art and athletics and so everybody sort of went Oh, this must be for artists or athletes In fact, uh, this is he's got a new textbook on flow and education that just came out and in the opening to the textbook He says the same thing. He's like, yeah, I sort of made this mistake in the beginning Um, I was you know, I was looking at it in this very specific framework I there there's I work with accountants We work, you know, we train a thousand people a month at the flow research collective 90 of them are c-suite executives That's the vast majority of them and usually our specialty is often super overstressed burned out You know, I was a peak performer and then I got super burned out like and lost it like We get we train so many of those people or our second largest population and this is just this year We you know what I mean, but it changes is uh powerhouse women in their 40s and 50s Who took time off to raise a family and are coming back and want like they did some other job Then they raise their family and they got a taste of oh, this is what passion feels like Okay, let's bring that into the workplace. How do I find that? How do I do that? Those are the vast majority of people we work with and a lot of them are very analytical jobs And so flow in those environments is really common. It's a really a misnomer That it's just for athletes and for artists Yeah, I I've certainly fallen into that myth myself looking for it in my personal life I think you know that brings up another interesting side of this which I wanted to talk about You know, obviously everyone understands peak performance and we would would love to operate at our optimal best right now we're we're living in a time where many of us are feeling burned out and Less access to nature less access to everything that was creating this opportunity for us to find flow so for those in our audience who are facing burnout And looking to to jump start and get back to where that performance was and obviously you do this professionally with c-suite executives What can we do number one to identify that? It's a state of burnout because I think many of us are walking around in a fog not realizing that it could be burnout There are very clear Identifiable symptoms for burnout. I think it's a recognized disorder at this point Irritability is really high on the list When I know I'm burned out. It's always the feeling of oh my god. I'm going nowhere Like I'm working really hard and the quality of work is I can't like it doesn't matter when I'm burned out Doesn't matter how many times I write a paragraph. It's still shit I like I can rewrite it a hundred times a hundred different ways and they're all crap There are precise neurobiological reasons for that You and there's really good burnout Diagnostics online, which is where I would for free. So I'll send people to there Let's talk about the second half of the question, which is what the hell do you do about it, right? And so here and this is really stuff I cover in art impossible under what I call the positive psychology basics So positive psychology has sort of spent 30 years identifying that six things Three on the physical side like this is what you need to do for energy And three on the mental side This is what you need to do to sort of like manicure your brain and turn down anxiety and calm the fuck down They're really not negotiables But they're not all that arduous and there's options. So like on the physical side There's three things that I think sit there one is And this is the first thing you can do if you're burned out is sleep We human beings need seven eight hours of sleep at night. You cannot perform at your best without seven eight hours of sleep at night There's no way around it. There's no other options You can't like there are occasionally people who can function On on on less sleep for bits and periods and whatever But if you're interested in reliable repeatable consistent peak performance And I always tell people a couple things you need to know right off the bat about peak performance One peak performance is nothing more than giving your biology to work for you rather than against you There's right. There's no secret secret. There's nothing. There's just your biology And it's just getting it to work for you and then again not a new idea 100 years ago William james says in the first psychology textbook ever ridden He says the great thing then in any education is to get your to make your nervous system your ally instead of your enemy Right, this is not new information. There's just our biology and It works a specific certain way And you just there's no way around this one and we're designed to function with seven eight hours of sleep at night You need that to function physically if you start looking at the list of like we talk about multi-tool solutions, right? Sleep is sleep solves So many problems. It's insane to cut back on that second thing on the physical side We're not going to linger here, but nutrition and hydration Eat good food drink plenty of water enough said right and then the final thing This is often this is often talked about as this positive psychology basic But the people put it on the cognitive side and there's a mistake there and I'll explain in a minute, which is social sport chris peterson a brilliant positive psychologist the university of michigan Says you can sum up 30 years in positive psychology in one phrase, which is other people matter We are social creatures We're hard wired contact the reasons on the energy side and I like Everybody's had this experience You know you get in a fight with your girlfriend your boyfriend your boss your sister your mom And then you try to go to work. How well can you focus? How much energy do you have right? It's impinging on you physically what people also don't realize is anytime you encounter a challenge a problem anything Your brain does an instantaneous risk assessment And part of that risk assessment is do I got posse? Because if you got to solve a problem alone, that's a big problem could be but if you've got six or seven friends family backing you up Lesser problem even if they're not immediately with you and you like you get fired at work You know somebody's going to feed you and put a roof over your head You know if this podcast thing doesn't work out so well for you guys You know what I mean hopefully yeah figures crossed, right? It was crossed What I always tell people and this is important is under normal conditions. You can usually screw up one a day Right like you can't do it every day. You got to get them right a bunch But you can screw up one a day and like still probably perform at your best You can't get enough sleep, but you've dialed in social support. You've hydrated and you're eating right You probably can power through and do it under stress conditions, which is the question you asked I don't think you can screw up on any of them under what we've been dealing with whether it's the economy our COVID the election time I mean take your pick up of everything that we've gone through over the past year And the turbulence it brought to all of us. I don't think we get to skimp on money at one of those Well, I was just gonna say we we've now been forced in a position where We're trying to escape what's going on. So we're staying up later watching shows not really getting the sleep that we need We're reaching for comfort food and things that maybe aren't as nutritious as we were eating pre pandemic And then on top of it. We've removed the social component from our work. We're on zoom We're just quickly having meetings getting on to the next thing. We're zoned in on our work We're maybe not seeing family and friends So it's real easy to see how those three physical things have been drastically impacted by what's going on around us We're not really realizing it because everyone's going through it at the same time and it's all sort of compounding Let's shift gears to the other side because that's the the part that I think the other side is important And I and work will come back We're gonna come back to your idea to have a second after we come to the other side because the other side Is the cognitive side right and it's how do we deal with you know, the anxiety and so much peak performance including flow Too much anxiety, which is actually the same neurochemical nor epinephrine, right? If I give you a little bit you get curiosity if I give you a little bit more you get passion I give you a little bit more you get anxiety and worry and all all right And I give you even more you you're into schizophrenia and other actual real like long term problems But uh, what do we do to control that? Well, there's three things a daily gratitude practice and uh One I want to I want to start with the science because When I say gratitude, I mean nothing wishy-washy. I we're not talking about new age spiritual anything We work, uh, we do extensive work with dr. Glenn fox in usc The world's leading expert on the neuro biology of gratitude Well, steven before you get into science. I want to set this up really quick for you Because we've of course had certainly in our years of podcasting meditation gurus on the show and and everyone There's plenty of people we even had david melzer on a few weeks ago who talked about why gratitude changed his life So in reading your book and I saw the science was like, yes Finally something that we can point to that that shows. Yeah, it's because otherwise it's ridiculous, right? Otherwise you're just like this is freaking nuts and why like yeah, no, I totally agree um And there's there's two things to know like one Affirmations, which is the new age spiritual side literally our disasters. They don't work And we'll talk about why and gratitude works and the reason so the thing you have to understand is that one We have what is known as a negativity bias We take in more negative information than positive information now. We take in 11 million bits of information a second by our senses that doesn't this is nothing internal We also generate a lot of internal stuff, but more a guy named Marvin Zimmerman measured it and according to his measurements It's 11 million bits of information a second consciousness what you're aware of what you can pay attention to it's 300 bits of information at once Maybe 2,000 bits at max people have gone back and forth about what the number is Then to put that in context you're listening we talk that's requiring 60 bits of information if we're both talking at once You're up to 120 if we add you we've maxed everybody out so somewhere between like 120 and 180 Is our is our threshold, but nobody it's very hard to listen to three people talk at once and process the information You usually lose somebody so that's the threshold so We take in nine negative bits of information for every one positive bit that gets through now optimism Is a huge Driver of peak performance we it would perform better when we're optimistic. So that's a problem right then and there also novelty Is the foundational and green in creativity? And if we're taking in nine negative things most of this shit that's negative the stuff we've seen before Right very rarely is the stuff that scares us totally out of the blue My point is that when you do a daily gratitude practice This tips the ratio And a daily gratitude practice is list three things you're grateful for and turn one of them into a paragraph It's a five-minute practice or list 10 things you're grateful for and just really try to feel the gratitude And what you do is you tip the brain's negativity bias You start taking in like six to one instead of nine to one or five to one And this is a huge huge huge deal and the reason gratitude works and affirmations don't work Is your brain has a fantastic bolt in bullshit detector? We all know this you can't lie to yourself You can lie to almost everybody else when you cannot lie to yourself for too long. You can't look in there and go I am a millionaire. I'm a millionaire. I'm a millionaire if you work at walmart Your brain goes dude, shut up. You work at walmart and that's massively demotivated Really really really demotivating right you were going in the exact opposite direction So gratitude for one works because it tips the negativity bias a little bit in our favor And we also know this is work that we did with glenn is that a regular gratitude practice actually makes you more prone to flow So it's got a direct correlation with uh frequency of flow. The next thing is Uh mindfulness, right? You've had guys talking meditation the thing that I think it's lost is You don't need all that much mindfulness Right, like if you're really just going for the cognitive benefits and another again mindfulness Respiration really good multi-tool solution solves a lot of different cognitive issues emotional regulation focused attention does a lot of good stuff But 11 minutes a day of breath work is enough to do it, right? And the final thing you can do for your head is exercise 20 to 40 minutes of exercise and by the way, what do you get then you get exercise induced transient hypofridality The deactivation of the prefrontal cortex we talked about earlier Right, that's what happens when it gets you work out in the gym. It gets quiet upstairs about 20 25 minutes in That's what's happening your prefrontal cortex is deactivating and it's an efficiency exchange Literally your brain says oh fuck you need a lot of energy because you're gonna need to focus on the treadmill You're running on is what shut off non critical structures. That's what happens the point on the cognitive side is five-minute gratitude practice 11-minute mindfulness practice or 20 to 40 minutes of exercise pick one a day You don't need to do all three And in crisis situations Covid where we are right now if you're burned out etc etc Maybe two out of three right for the first in back in march during the lockdown I was you know, I was exercising every day. I was meditating every day I was doing gratitude work every day and I was doing all six You know all the sleeping seven eight hours a night and their grit skills in a sense Right, we talk about when we train people in recovery the art of recovery at the flow research collective Which is hugely important and by the way if you're burned out Active recovery is the next thing you have to add in right? That's the other right I will we can talk about the cure for burnout in half a second But these are the six things to start with the net if you want there's two things I'd add if you're burnt out Which is we all have what is known as a primary flow activity This is whatever that thing you did as a kid that just automatically dropped you into flow Maybe it was dancing to hip-hop. Maybe it was coloring Maybe it was going to the natural history museum and staring at dinosaur bones Maybe it was skiing in my case or you know, and I mean there's skateboarding in yours But we all had that activity and usually as we become adults it goes away, right? Like oh, I've got responsibilities. I've got work. This is the thing we hang up with a couple things to know one Flow is essentially a focusing skill. So the more flow you get the more flow you get I go skiing On Monday it means that I'm going to have an easier time getting the flow on Thursday because I'm training my brain How to focus in that way also Creativity innovation massively heightened in flow 400 to 700 depending on whose studies you're looking at And work out of harvard shows that that heightened creativity will outlast the flow state by a day. Maybe two So even if you go skiing on monday or skating on monday, right that heightened creativity that heightened problem solving innovation all that stuff It could be with you till wednesday. This is a huge bonus and It's an enormous because when we move into flow There's a global release of a chemical a nitric oxide. It's a gaseous sickling molecules everywhere in the body It completely flushes all the stress hormones out of our system So it resets the nervous system if you're burned out you can't reset your nervous system That's one of the reasons you're burned out So automatizes that and the other thing that I want to add for the burnout crowd is active recovery Passive recovery is I worked all day. It's a tv at a beer and that actually blocks what you want active recovery Epsom salt bath infrared sauna dry sauna restorative yoga a long walk in nature to go back to the earlier topic right Gardening any of these things these are sort of restorative active recovery get a massage foam rollers take your pick but We have found out the flow research collective that if you are Sort of peg it into the positive psychology basics and I don't mean like your anal I get it right every single day. I do all right. I mean you're just Trying to be smart about it You get regular once a week access to a flow even if it's just 20 minutes a half an hour an hour And you have an active recovery protocol. We don't have data on this yet But as far as we can tell you can't burn out like it seems to be prophylactic against burnout and I got to use prophylactic in a sentence. So there Especially around burnout not expecting that I certainly know for myself with covid one of my activities was My social life of performance of playing music with my band getting into the rehearsal room all that was taken from me during covid And aj knows for me that was such a large part of my life. I've been playing in bands since I was 15 years old I love those moments on stage or even even just getting in the room with the guys and drifting off for in a sound Soundscape for a few hours having that taken from me has made me during covid incredibly irritable not being able to focus and I've had to set time just to pick up my guitar and And in the times of where I would find myself at rehearsals I would have to find that time Again, and that has been the most difficult part of covid for myself of having that opportunity taken from me I will say I worked essentially seven years straight to get to a book that was published last january called futures faster than you think for a lot of different reasons And I was going to literally I worked seven years straight without even a vacation Other than going skiing for like half day, you know what I mean? I was going to ski all of march april and may I was just done I was I've had enough I was good and As soon as Peter and I were like first day of our book tour was the day covid hit So I think shut the ski resorts. I got no for seven years I was aiming for this just make it here. Just make it here, right? and so I um one of the founding ideas underneath resilience is Setting long term is turning current Stripe into long term goals And so what I basically said to myself is the only way I'm going to not go crazy From losing out on the skiing and the and the access to flow was going to give me Was if I could I the goal I set was I I needed to enter ski season A better skier than I ended last year which and and so I was like, well, how do I do that? And I created this crazy training program that I could do without gyms over the summer And I also, you know, I added a couple more things into it But I I this isn't really something we talk about in our impossible But you're bringing it up. I find that with those kinds of challenges you can long term goal setting We don't talk about this a lot. I don't a little bit in our impossible, but Because of how we filter information because it's this huge, right? 11 million down to 300 what do we filter? What what are the filters? Well fear is one obvious that we talk about that What's the other half goals? That's the other big filter is that our filter on reality is our fears and our goals We essentially don't live in reality, right? We live in a reality created by our fears and our goals That's most of the world we're in All the time and so if you don't have like if you are getting your ass kicked in some way I can't play music with my band which I is a high flow thing Really thought blah blah. I can see all the problems there. Um, I like I would say okay Then I'm gonna you know, I said Musical challenges and goals that you can accomplish on your own so that when you come back to it Well after these after our vaccine show up, perhaps That that would be my work around for that because it was the only way I stayed sane Nobody was happier to be skiing this way Like I cannot let my arm above here because I hit the ground so hard because I was like Just deciding that I was gonna like I did I got better I I learned a bunch of freestyle tricks over like on door And then I brought them into the uh onto snow And let's just say that didn't all go as planned I entered the season stronger and better than I finished last season, but they there were some errors Which is completely normal. I did hit the ground rather hard about 50 times two days ago Now in the the setup to the book everyone understands art of impossible the capital i impossible the moon shots and and You know the people that are absolutely extraordinary that we look up to But I love this idea of dialing it down to the the lowercase i and and bringing it into your own life We we've sort of danced around it. We've talked about a few parts of the stack But I would love as we we wrap here to really just cover What this impossible stack is and how we can turn that small i impossible for ourselves with neuroscience into something that we're capable of So There's two ideas here one. We already talked about which is Your performance is nothing more than giving your biology to work for you rather than against you So there's a limited suite of biology biological tools That i'll get that you can use to take on super hard challenges But I want to go to your point. Thank you for bringing this up because um, it's a great point and it's worth making There we're all familiar with capital i impossible says you point This is alex hunt with climbing l cap. This is rosa park sitting at the front of the bus This is einstein and the theory of relativity right these are the white right brothers These are the impossible for familiar with capital i impossible that which has never been done There's also a small i impossible Which is that which we believe is impossible for us And you know the simple example i gave was when I was growing up in cleveland, ohio Right blue collar kind of kind of childhood. I wanted to be a writer from the time I was four years I didn't know any writers I mean that would be like me waking up one day and being like, okay, I want to be an elf or a dwarf I think I'd be a dwarf, right? I mean I had no idea there was no and it was impossible in the reason What I mean by that is no clear path between point a and b and statistically horribly bad odds of success But also that's a small i impossible But so is rising out of poverty or overcoming deep trauma or figuring out how to get paid doing what you love for a living Right these are all small i impossible small i impossible is that which we believe is impossible for us that formula is Nobody very few people set out to accomplish capital i impossible That's not what they set out to accomplish They set out to accomplish small i impossible and they do the first one and they're like, oh wow I pulled myself out of poverty or I I lost a leg or I was raped or whatever it was that was Horrifying I oh what else can I do what can I do next? What can I do next what can I do next and if you accomplish enough small i impossible Sooner or later you will start pushing into capital i impossible range, right? It's what happens The actual formula is actually fairly simple It's When you're talking about human peak performance, you need the motivation To get you into the game and motivation is a catch-all right when psychologists talk about motivation they're talking about intrinsic motivation curiosity passion purpose right they're also talking about goals And grit and in a sense you need the motivation to get into the game Goals tell you where you're going Grit as keeps you going then you need learning right because learning allows you to continue to play And then you need creativity because that's how you steer Right, that's how you get where you want to go. That's the self expression We talked about earlier and finally you need flow To turbo boost everything beyond all reasonable expectations And that's literally that's the the system is designed to work that way Literally in that order right like the system is designed to start with really basic intrinsic motivators curiosity Curiosity is designed to be built into passion passion is designed to be built into purpose Once you have purpose. What do you need autonomy another big intrinsic motivated to the freedom to pursue your purpose Once you're free to pursue your purpose. What do you need now mastery the skills to pursue that purpose? Well, okay, I've got the skills. I got the freedom. What do I need now? I need goals. Where the fuck am I going right like It's it's not it's very commonsensical And the neurobiology follows the common sense in a sense in it That was an awkward sentence, but you get my point Well, and I want to start at the the beginning because we have Certainly clients over the years who come to us feeling a lack of curiosity and It then becomes difficult obviously to get on this journey of impossible without that starting point and in the book You had a great challenge that I would love to share with our audience around building up this curiosity I can make it easier for your audience. We're going to send your audience to passion recipe dot com And the whole for prince thing you're going to put people through beautiful We put it up. We built it a good friend of ours built the coolest interactive pdf For the whole thing. So it like we got sexy tech underneath the passion recipe now It's even better than it is in the book. But yeah, this is how you cultivate curiosity This is how you turn curiosity into passion. This is how you turn passion a purpose And certainly this is one of those dividing lines for a lot of people, right? Some people your music my skiing and right like I've known what I wanted to do Since I was four and the puzzle was how to do it. There was right There was no question, right Other people are like, oh my god, and but the couple things to say here I say this in the book, but it's you always have to remember passion On the front end when you're starting It never looks like passion on the back end, right? I say what does the passion athlete look like and you're you got LeBron James It's the windmill scowl dunk in the finals right over some four Some four point guards had we'd like with that scowl on his face that he gets like we that's what we think of as passion Right and we forget that on the front end passion is just like a little kid in a in a driveway Shooting a ball through a hoop, right? That's what it looks like on the front end and it looks like that for all of us and Curiosity and a passion like it's a learning process and As a learning process the rule is the same. You're gonna suck Until you don't right like we learn is invisible process So our experience is I suck. I suck. I suck. I suck. Oh, wow. I don't suck Right, that's and that's everybody in the world Right, like there's my friend Andrew Eberman who's a neuroscientist at Stanford he says the thing that peak performers always know that most people don't know is it's always Crawl walk run most everybody else comes in going. I want a shortcut I don't want to I'm not gonna crawl and I'm really not all that interested in walking. Can I can I jog? I'm gonna start out. I'm gonna find some way. I'm gonna get jiggy. I'm gonna start at a jog, right and Peak performers know that it's always like all of us It doesn't matter who you are you could be best in the world that whatever when you switch to something now Whatever it is. It could be turning to your ass in the bash and It's always crawl walk run and so peak performers just don't waste any time Like it's not that they're even they're gonna get there faster It's not that they're faster than you is that you're fucking around trying to look for a shortcut And peak performers are just like, yeah, that's the racing of there are no shortcuts This is how you learn this the hard way Which uh, I think is incredibly useful when you approach these ideas you were saying something Well, I just want to add to that and finding other people who are at your level with skillset to build community to be able to do it together Because as you said you can't loan wolf this stuff. Well, you can but it's it's demo It's very difficult But if you have others around you who are just excited about this new thing that you all suck at You can all go out there and suck at it together and have a blast and for for ourselves with Our community is pairing up everyone to work on these things that they're they're all walking into for the first time and having fun with it and anything that you can Surround yourself with other people at that level Who are passionate about or is at least curious you you will turn it in the fun I agree and by the way, I'm an introvert loan wolf like I that's how I'm wired Like I really am I my wife is too like both of us will spend 14 15 hours a day By ourselves not talking to anybody and I'll go down a writing hole and I won't talk to I won't even talk to her much for months on end like but I will say It's right with flow size and researchers like like it is more fun Um, and I'm the biggest loan wolf and I love that shit, but it is more fun if you can do it together Well, we love this line both of us Frustration isn't the sign you're moving in the wrong direction. It's the sign you're moving in the right direction Oh, this dovetails brilliantly. That's a cognitive load issue, right? Like flow is the best we get to feel the planet, but there's a struggle phase It starts with struggle and so this is not in the book. Maybe this is a line, but this is work. We're doing right now It appears that you will always need to at least trigger the fight response to get into flow So even if it only lasts a second, right? Like you're gonna have to get gritty and aggressive for just a nanosecond On the front end of flow, so you're not going to ever avoid the struggle And yeah, I think this is an education comment, right? This is something I do tell parents Which is like you have to teach this to your kids because when I was growing up I thought when I got frustrated I couldn't learn something and I was I was doing something wrong Exactly. I like I was like, oh it's a sign. You're going in the right direction This was also this is another story in the book that I thought for a really long time until laird hamilton set me straight. I thought courage meant not feeling fear I didn't realize that courage meant oh you you everybody feels this terrible. You just do it anyways I thought to be courageous. I had to not feel feared. I was like, I don't know how to do that I'm scared of everything but I can learn to ignore the fear and go right at it if that's you know what I mean Yeah staring down the fear and I think that's such an important lesson because there are so many things in life That frustrated us and we drop them and we don't even get to the state that we could get curious to start the path to flow We feel frustration And we back away and we say that's for someone else and we never really push through that and to realize that That's a signal that we're on the right track not going in the wrong direction It's even better than that like not only is this signal you're on the right track There's overwhelming evidence and uh david f steven. I write about david's work in art impossible He's a friend. He talks about this a lot more in range But the science is really clear You cannot predict what you're going to be good at or what you're going to like Before doing it and actually before getting good at right like literally this is you can take a perfect You can go to lebron james and say okay, you are obviously a professional athlete You know your body's super well. Let's say lebron's never played highlight, right or badman And you you can say lebron you think you're going to like highlight or badman or lacrosse if he's not played Those sports even with his level of physical prowess He's not an accurate judge of whether or not he's going to like it or be good at it Which is crazy, but it seems to be true So you can't like your frustration is a sign you're moving in the right direction and honest to god Until you get past the frustration you have no idea if you're going to like it or be good at it For me, that's golf and I when I think about professional athletes as they retire Try to take up golf and seeing just how frustrated charles barkley was over the weekend We look at athletes and we we assume that things just come naturally to them that frustration was not a part of that journey at all And I love that you point that out. Yeah, you know laird hamilton and I talk about something else It's very similar along those lines Which is he's he has said this to me He's like, you know people see me on a 50 foot wave or 100 foot wave and they think oh, I could never frickin do that Like that's impossible. I could never do that. He's like what they didn't see is 3 year old me on a 3 foot wave and 4 year old me on a 4 foot wave and 5 year old me on a 5 foot wave Right like people look at that and go. Oh my god. That's crazy. That's impossible And for him a week ago. He surfed a 49 and a half foot wave So what he's doing today is like it's a half a foot harder for him But you're the everything else is completely invisible to you And so you don't see that and you'd write you miss all of that stuff I well now we have the technology and the videos for all of these athletes I always think about tony hawk. We basically have watched his career from 13 years old Which is just remarkable Now we love to ask every guest What their x factor is what sets them apart skill set and mindset to make them successful Obviously locking yourself up for seven years to write a book, you know a few things about your own x factor How would you define your x factor? People will tell you I'm willing to outwork anybody I just always assume that I wasn't the smartest guy or the most talented guy But I don't get into anything if I can't try to be best in the world If i'm going to do it, I want to be best in the world. I want to try to be best in the world Otherwise, I don't get involved So they'll say that I if you actually ask me I think what I the my x factor is Everything I've done has I it's because I think Macroscopically very well I so I I can think very very very broadly and so when I was a journalist I was what was known as a big think writer which sounds fancy What it means I worked at the intersection of subjects right there So you want to like crawl down a money trail? I'm not your guy That's a different kind of thing But like if you want to know where does politics and religion and action sports intersect and go find a story there I'm your guy and it's because I think Naturally at a systems level So thinking Microscopically was very difficult for me. I have to know the big picture framework before I can understand it And I don't know if that's an actual skill or the fact that I was interested in things like systems analysis and Evolution and how rain forests work and those kinds of questions that force you to learn to think that way So I don't know which if it was natural or came first That and the fact that I love to read I mean, you know what I mean like Books are where they keep the secrets folks, right? I I love that saying it's so and we would love our audience to read Your latest the art of impossible. Thank you so much for joining us. This is such a pleasure. Oh, it's my pleasure Thank you guys appreciate you