'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.

Chapters

• 1:56 Fireside Chat
• 35:02 Q&A

Transcript

Leon Goren: 0:00

Hi, I'm Leon Goren, president of PEO leadership, a peer to peer leadership advisory firm. We're an amazing community of CEOs, presidents and senior executives. Ask yourself, are you learning as fast as the world is changing? It's time for Ontario business leaders to band together for counseling support, it's time for you to tap into the business with some of our peer groups and unlock new ways to grow. I want you to come out of this COVID crisis a better leader and your organization ready for what's next, take the first step at peo-leadership.com. A New York Times bestselling author and award winning journalist and the executive director of the flow research collective. He's one of the world's leading experts on human performance and the author of nine bestsellers out of 13 bucks total, including the art of impossible the futures faster than you think it's dealing fires the rise of Superman, bold and abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes translated into 40 languages, and appeared in over 100 publications including the New York Times Magazine wired Atlantic Monthly time and the Harvard Business Review. Stephens also the co host of flow research, collective radio, a top 10 iTunes science podcast, and along with his wife, author, Joey Nicholson is the co founder of Rancho Chihuahua, hospice and special needs dog sanctuary. So as I begin this session, here's how the hour is gonna unfold. fireside chat with Steven will do for about 30 to 35 minutes, and then we'll open it up to q&a and ask that you post your questions in the chat. What I'll do is I'll try and identify them pick them up. And if possible, have you come off mute and ask him the question directly. Try and think of questions, absolute general questions to Steven but you got an expert in the room. So if you're really challenged with something, even at the moment, it's a great time to push that towards Steven and see what he can do. So Steven is so great to have you with us today. Thank you for joining us with

Steven Kotler: 1:56

you. Thanks. I

Leon Goren: 1:57

know it's early. Where are you in California

Steven Kotler: 2:00

this morning in Nevada, Northern Nevada, South Lake Tahoe on the Nevada side.

Leon Goren: 2:04

That's beautiful. Well, we're here in Toronto, and spring has finally arrived. So it's awesome. We're all smiling. So I'm going to jump right into this with you. And we're going to set the stage. And I know you have it. Do obviously you do that the biological capability is all within us to achieve the impossible. Now we can define impossible, the big guy, the smaller, but you fundamentally believe and you've done the research that we all have it within us. And I just want to make sure that that's how we start today. So everyone in this room gets it in their head that what they can do. It's within their capabilities.

Steven Kotler: 2:45

That is correct. I could say hey, I like to little a little more dramatic than I might have presented it but foundationally Correct, yes. What 30 years of sitting kind of the I work on the neurobiology of peak human performance. So what's going on in the brain and the body wouldn't perform at our best. And there's a bunch of different things going on. But what you're really referring to and when we say everybody is hardwired for the extraordinary, everybody's hardwired to tackle impossible challenges. Um, one of the things we're talking about is that every human being, and in fact, most mammals are hardwired to produce a state of consciousness known as flow, right? You may call it Runner's higher being in the zone or being unconscious flow is a technical term, it is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness, we feel our best and we perform our best we're all familiar with it flow refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption, it's so focused on the task at hand, everything else just seems to disappear. Action awareness will start to merge, your sense of self self consciousness that's going to diminish. Time is gonna pass strangely, it'll speed up and five hours go by in like five minutes, maybe it'll slow down and you get a freeze frame effect. My name has been in a car crash throughout all aspects of performance, both mental and physical go through the roof. So when we say everybody is capable of extraordinary flow is an extraordinary boost to our capabilities, motivation, grit, learning rates, creative problem solving, productivity, empathy, environmental awareness, strength, fast twitch muscle response, I can go on all of these things, massively increase in flow, in some cases, 500% above baseline. And let me give you one example, just made that even a little more clear. McKinsey, the business consultancy, went around the globe talking to CEOs top leaders about how much more productive they felt in flow. And it's self reported a grain of salt, but they spent a decade doing it, and the average was 500%. more productive. 11% more productive means you can go to work on Monday, spend Monday in a flow state, you take Tuesday through Friday off you're still going to get as much done as everybody else. Two days a week and flow you're 1,000% more productive than the competition. So this is a massive action toleration above baseline, and it's available to each and every one of us. If I were to put it more broadly, I would say luck, performance, whatever you want to call peak performance, it's nothing more or less than getting our biology to work for us, rather than against us. And that's a limited set of skills flows a big part of it. There's other things that come into play. But it's a biology is limited. So if we can get it optimized, if we can get it working together, working the way 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: 5:36

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 talked about this, right, you broke it down into motivation, creativity, learning, learning and creativity, the flow flows through the whole thing, every one of those different chapters. Today, you know, I'm thinking about the environment we all live in today, right? So us is maybe a little bit different than Canada, but we're still in the midst, I think North American wide, we're all through going through COVID. Hopefully, we're in the marathon, the finish line is coming. We're hoping at least it's within vision. I know there's a lot of reflection going on. But a lot of people today, like we've gone through a year of this, it's been insanity. In the beginning, the motivation, when I'm trying to understand and maybe you can help the audience here, I say reflect, I kind of think it's almost a great time to start thinking about finding that new passion, finding that new purpose potentially revitalizing themselves. And in that early section, a book can you talk motivation, you talk about finding the passion, maybe walk us through some of the ideas around that people who are going through this a little bit right now where they would start?

Unknown: 6:50

Perfect. So

Steven Kotler: 6:56

let me put up when we say motivation, which is where if you're interested in peak performance, as you mentioned, yeah, there are four major sets of skills are motivational skills, learning skills, creativity, skills, and flow skills. If you want a simple way to think about it, motivation gets you into the game. Learning allows you to continue to play creativity is how you steer and flow is how you turbo boosts the results beyond expectation. That's the simple way to think about it. But when you say motivation, or learning or creativity or even flow scientifically, these are catch all terms. Right? motivation doesn't just mean motivation. It means extrinsic motivation, stuff we want in the real world that will work hard for money, sex, fame, intrinsic motivation, curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery, right? things that really drive us on the inside. They also mean grit and goals. At the heart of the question is where do you start at a basic level, where you want to always want to start is just to put it in context is with extrinsic motivation, what the by science is really clear on this, starting with Abraham Maslow and going all the way through Danny Kahneman today. If you want to increase motivation, the first place you got to start is with safety and security motivation, you have to make enough money to pay your rent, pay your bills. And to not worry, right, that's probably not a problem for anybody listening today. But it is probably an issue for some of your employees. So if you're trying to motivate employees, right, and they are literally wondering, you know, can I make my rent? Can I pay my bills, where's my next paycheck gonna come from? You literally can't you're blocking blocking peak performance. If people have the anxiety that comes from that it's a it stands in the way of all peak performance. Once that's problem is solved, intrinsic motivation comes next internal 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 work together. They're designed to come online in a specific order. And the way you should think about this, and this is the answer to your question, Leon, if you're looking for more passion and purpose in your life, curiosity is the foundational ingredient in passion. When we say curiosity, when we're curious about something, the brain produces a little bit of norepinephrine and a little bit of dopamine. These are performance enhancing neural chemicals. They do a bunch of things in the brain in the body, but mainly they drive focus. So when you're curious about something, you pay attention to it, no work required happens automatically. If you can find the intersection of multiple curiosities, where three or four your curiosities intersect, that's the seed kernel of passion. Passion is mystified in today's world, we hear all about it. Oh, I want to find my passion. It's super important and like, first of all, what's the big deal about passion you get focused for free, that's the big deal produces this shit ton of norepinephrine and dopamine mean and like, think about romantic love when you fell in love with you know your first girlfriend or boyfriend, how much attention were you packed, you couldn't stop focusing on them and happened automatically didn't have to do hard work. So if you can find the intersection with a place where multiple curiosities intersect and start to kind of play their meaning, find the intersection, just learn more and more about that intersection, 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 start to build and start to build. That's how you kind of develop passion, you then literally can take that passion, and you couple it to a cause greater than yourself something outside yourself, right? I like to say, Make a list of 25 things you're curious about, then find places that you know, four or five, tend to intersect. Right, give you an example, let's say and one thing when you're doing this work, you want to be as specific as possible. The brain works really well with specifics. It doesn't work with generalities. So it's not. I'm interested in football and food. It's, I'm interested in the mechanics of what does it take to play left tackle? And I'm interested in insects is a new protein source. Okay, those are your two curiosities. And my curiosity. I mean, like you got a free weekend, you want to spend it, reading some books, watching some movies talking to an expert like we're not, this is not complicated. Where to football and food intersect? Well, I don't know, left tackle is a job that requires a lot of energy. Do insects make a good food source for playing left tackle? That's the intersection. It's been 20 minutes researching that today, tomorrow, the next day, the next day, see if it starts to write one curiosity, there's not enough energy there for passion, you find multiple intersections and energy there, you couple it to a problem that is greater than yourself. And what happens when you do that, again, purpose is one of these terms that like we sort of mystify in the modern world, we think all purpose is so altruistic, it's so great. For the world, you're such a good person, you have purpose, you want to help the world. That may be true, but from what biological performance perspective purposes is entirely selfish. You kick the norepinephrine and dopamine, the feel good and performance enhancing reward chemicals that show up with passion, and then you get more feel good reward neuro chemistry, you get endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin, all the chemicals that show up. Once there's other people involved in a situation. When you're trying to solve a problem in the world, you're helping other people, and you get pro social reward chemicals as a reward. So what do you get you get more feel good drugs on the inside and greater productivity on the outside focus for free everywhere you want to go?

Q&A from Audience: 12:44

What would you tell people in terms of finding that passion? Like you're talking about 20 minutes a day? Is it a? Is it a process that will take me a month or two? Is it a process? Maybe a couple years? Will it change? Like what happens when my passions 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 the art impossible, the new book, but I've just put putting something in the in the chat, we took the front of the book, The passion recipe, which is how you turn curiosity and passion passion into purpose and turned it into a free workbook and or a kind of video breakdown of how to do it. So I just put that in the chat that's available to anybody, you can go there and go crazy on how to do it. Here's the thing, you want to do this slowly. In peak performance, there are a handful of places where you have to go slow to go fast. Passion, cultivating passion and turning passion. The purpose is really important. And the reason is simply this, you do not want to be two years into your passion to discover, oh, it's only a phase, right? Like I had a friend who got super passionate about archaeology, like out of nowhere, suddenly, they're gonna be career changed. I'm an archaeologist, they get all crazy that all worked up and set up for a two year dig in Egypt. And they get like six weeks into the dig. And they're like I frickin can this and I'm like, I'm now slave labor for the next 18 months. And you really want to do this slowly. And don't be impatient with yourself. The biology is actually designed to work a little more slowly here for a lot of these reasons, so you can't be impatient with yourself in any of this work. being impatient with yourself. Really, it's just so costly to do peak performance work. Self forgiveness, and patience are just really key. You'll just get so much more work done with so much less pain. If you have a little bit of self forgiveness and a little bit patience with 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, like there isn't, you know, you kept you talk about it numerous times in that book. It's not just we need to extend our thinking, we need to think bigger than we're actually thinking. A lot of the time, especially,

Steven Kotler: 15:23

let me the way I was explaining this to people, because it's really you'll get it when you're on. So I spent my whole career around people who have accomplished capitalize on possible right that which has never 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 own personal experience. My one of my closest friends and my partner, sometimes a writing partner, we've written three books together. Peter Diamandis was the original founder of the XPrize. And the XPrize. unlocked the space frontier, Peter wanted to make private space travel available to anyone you wanted to go into space, he knew NASA wasn't going to give him a ride, ride, he was too short, he didn't follow directions. Well, like they were just he was not astronaut material. He knew it right. But he wanted to unlock the space frontier. And so we created the XPrize. And it was a private competition for the first outside team that can build a private spaceship go into space twice in two weeks. And that's a reusable space. It was the thing that nobody could build, and run like the space frontier. And it when when he proposed it, I wrote the first international major article on Peter Wright. And ever I talked to everybody in the aerospace community, and they all basically said, Peters out of his frickin mind, this is never going to happen is impossible. Then I took the Massa, they sort of reiterated every point in much more colorful language. And they were like, Look, we get to the moon, we took 10,000 engineers, and it took $10 billion. And that's what it's going to take anybody, there's no way, you know, you put up $10 million for a team. It's never gonna happen. This is crazy. You're out of your frickin mind. And yet, eight years later, or can when's the XPrize with a $30 million spaceship, and a team of 30 engineers and unlocks the space frontier in private space is now a $3 billion a year industry and growing gangbusters, right? He that's an impossible thing he did. And I got to watch the entire thing up close and personal. So what does it look like to see the impossible be impossible up close and personal. Check it out. Peter wakes up, he's breakfast talks on the phone for a little while, then he types into his computer, he goes to the bathroom. Then he comes back, he touches on his computer, and he gets on a different phone call. And then a different phone call. Then he has lunch, after lunch, maybe takes a nap maybe goes to the gym. He has more phone calls, couple more conversations, and then there's food. Sound familiar? We all have the same 24 hours in the day, we all basically do the same thing in those 24 hours. Often the only difference between do I want to unlock this bass frontier? Or do I want to become the best dry cleaner in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the energy requirement is the same. If you're interested in being the best. You're going to give everything you got to every moment. That's what we do when we're interested in being the best. So the energy and what you're doing with it, it's roughly the same. It's the size of the original vision that matters so much. I talk a lot about this. In my book bold, which is a book on how do you solve impossible business challenges. And it came from spending a lot of time with Larry Page, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, people who've done possible business things in near record time. And we talked a lot about Google's moonshots. Right? What's a moonshot? a moonshot is right, a 10x improvement over existing right structures. So it's 1000 times 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 bunch. It's going to happen, right? These are moonshots. But it is often easier to go for something that is 1000 times better. And something that's 10% better, because you're 10% better, you Selena smart mess contest with everybody else in the world who's trying to be 10% better. But if you're 1,000% better, you have to throw out everything that's existing, all the rules, all the technology, all the ideas, you've got to start over. And that's a liberating structure that often makes it easier to go big, rather than go small. And as you pointed out, as we started this for a lot of different biological reasons, the human brain is actually hardwired to go big. we're hardwired for self actualization. We want to become the very best version of ourselves. That's how we're biologically designed. Or, as Abraham 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, as the, as you think big, you know, one thing that strikes me maybe this leads into the next thing, it's, we're all gonna, we're all gonna run into roadblocks so I'm gonna assume everyone in the room, everyone knows how to set goals. Maybe they don't know the big goals, but they bring it down into smaller goals. But as from working towards that, that impossible. Whatever we define it as for each of us, it's different. We're gonna run into walls all the time. You talk about the grit element, the ferocity element bringing flow into it. Can you share some ideas around the challenges we face or we're going to face as we move towards impossible, and 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't I mean, let's not kid ourselves, whether you know, it's capitalized and possible doing that which has never been done small ly impossible. That stuff we think is impossible for ourselves. Or even if you just want to be more productive and creative at work next week. Good news is the biology is the same the toolkits the same. Bad news is it's not easy. Like it's just not it's not easy, in general here on planet Earth. And performance is an easy, I will say that I really think that the only thing worse than the pain of stocking the impossible is the pain of not trying to stock the impossible. I think trying to live with ourselves and live with underachievement is much more 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 the one thing you should know, then we'll go into grit. So we have what are known as emotional set points, these are created roughly by the time we're 1011 or 12. And we have a low point and a high point, the low point is roughly the worst we're gonna feel on the planet, the high point is roughly the best we're gonna feel most of life takes place in the middle. Now you can move these points, right, regular access to flow will increase the the upper end of the emotional side, once you can, life gets better a lot. death of a child or chronic unemployment will lower the lower setpoint. But other than that life is going to take place inside the inner now I want you to think about something you've all been teenagers. What does being a teenager mean? It means that your brain is not fully developed means you have no emotional regulation capabilities, and it means your hormones are raging. In other words, you've already probably felt the very worst you're going to feel on this planet. If you survive being a teenager, and you've made it into adulthood, you've actually already tough enough to take anything that's coming. With a couple of exceptions, you may have to deal with that agony. A couple days in a row, it may stretch out for a longer period of time, but honest to God, like we don't think about it, because nobody talks 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? What am I can achieve what? Well, I don't know. But you've already experienced the worst, probably that you can feel, actually. So one, you're tough enough. So I get to what the research shows about grit is it is easier to train grit after you sort of get all your intrinsic motivators pointed in the same direction. Because once that happens, you're going to start automatically a lot of the intrinsic motivators are flow triggers, they preconditions that lead to more flow below, amplifies massively amplifies grit. Once an experience starts producing flow, we love it, we go extraordinary or out of out of our way to get more of it. And grit sort of takes care of itself. To put in more specific terms, they did a really cool study of like a giant High School 542 students, and they looked at the students, what they called their primary secondary activity. School was their primary activity. So this primary secondary play tube in the band, you play football, right? Are you in debate club, whatever it was, and they asked what conditions if you're doing this freshman year, what are the conditions that guarantee that you had the grit to still be doing it when you graduated as senior. And what they found is there was only one condition that experiences that produce the most flow as a freshman. Those were the guarantees that they were going to still be doing it as a senior flow and grit are often very synonymous, which is why you want to start training grit. After you certainly got everything pointed in the same direction and starting to produce flow. So one that makes the grit training easier, you're less likely to burn out it's less likely to be as miserable and it's much more rewarding along the way. The other thing is this. We are designed biologically hardwired to for grit. I mean you beings are incredibly gritty, for example, we are the only species that evolved to run down our prey. Human beings are designed to be gritty enough to chase an antelope across a desert for three days and catch it for dinner. We are so gritty on the inside, from an evolutionary perspective, it's insane. We just met William James pointed this out all the quotes in the art impossible. But like 100 years ago, he said, Look, we all have the experience of second wind, we've all had that experience, you're exhausted, you're tired, whether it's at work or doing some athletic or whatever. And suddenly you have a second wind, what most people don't realize is there's a third wind, a fourth, wind, a fifth wind a six win, because you're not reliably pushing on your skills. So the good news is, grit is remarkably easy to train, it's really easy to train on the bad. The bad news is, it doesn't feel very good. One secret, though, which is kind of counterintuitive, because I'm guessing that most people, you know, on the zoom call, they want more grit at work, they may want more, a little more grit at the gym, or they might want a little more grip in their relationships, or whatever. But you really want to be a little grittier at work. What's interesting is if you want cognitive grit, what the research shows is, you want to start on the physical side. So you literally want to start in the gym, or with whatever kind of physical activity. This is not always the case that the body has primaries see over the mind, like it's not there's, there's a bunch of physical chauvinists in the embodied cognition world that you'll bump into, if you get into this, this this world at all, who like to tell you that all the body is the master thing. And don't worry 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 gritty at work, what you want to start doing is if you're going to the gym, and you're doing, you know, 1010 exercises, three sets of 10 each exercise. Next time you go to the gym, it's three sets of two sets of 10 and one set of 11. On one of those exercises, you start really small, and you just push a little bit, a little bit a little bit. And what you're trying to do is literally just teach your brain that you're tough enough to take it. grit is less about, can I persevere, and more about teaching the brain that you're not going to die if you persevere, right, because the brain wants to convince you that you're going to die if you push through 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 to have grit, they didn't get to where they were without grit, because everyone's gone through some challenges, especially in the business world, is what he and I mean, this outside of the context of the book, but as leaders, we you know, one of the challenges we have is engaging and inspiring our people, right. So driving, having getting a passionate having them have a purpose around the organization to push for helping them develop some grit to actually push forward as well. You've worked with a lot of leaders, is there anything that sticks out in your mind in terms of how they've been effective within their organization, engaging others, like what we've talked about today is engaging ourselves, we can control that. Are there tricks that we can use to engage our 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 been everywhere these days, right? But um, simply put, anxiety, blocks peak performance, right, the more anxiety in our system, the worst we're going to perform. And this is why you're seeing gratitude practices or mindfulness practices are the best way to fight anxiety. By the way, gratitude, practice mindfulness, or breath, work, focus, meditation, or exercise. So one of the reasons you're seeing so much of that stuff rolled out, place to start, it calms people down. Group flow is the shared collective version of the flow state, right? It's what you want in your team, it's a team performing at their very best. And group flow like flow has triggers, there are preconditions that will lead to more group flow there, there are 10 that are known. This is not my work. It was the work of a guy named Keith Sawyer. He's a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, um, who I originally identified these things. So if you want more passion, performance, or all that stuff from your team, one of the things to do is really pay attention to group flows triggers, you can find really full breakdown at the end of my recent book, The Impossible key so I wrote a fantastic book called group genius about all his work on how he came up with these both those are a really decent place to start on. You'll note when you look at the group flow triggers, there is a lot of overlap between some of the triggers and psychological safety and a lot of the triggers are less about how you act in the room with the team and more about how do you build the team? How do you design high flow teams? And the third thing that I think is just I mean, this is so obvious It was funny. I was Daniel Goleman, who basically invented emotional intelligence. and I were talking a couple about a month ago about about this very question, because he has spent really, for rowsley, long time 30 years now looking at emotional intelligence in leaders, what makes a good leader the very, the very question you asked, he's really looked at it. And so when I was talking to him, I was picking his brain on this and the same thing I wrote, you know, at the flourish, collective 70 people work for me, right? It's a it's a, 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 a guy who's like, ever thought he was going to be, you know, leading, you know, a eight figure company with 70 people. But, so I've had to learn a lot of this stuff on the fly also, as well. And one of the things we were talking about, and when I was laughing, because I fell short on this as well is you're going to be a visionary leader, map passionate people underneath you, you have to be you have to be communicating that vision to your company, right? in art impossible. I talked about the three tiers of goal setting the top is a massively transformative purpose. Right, massively transformative purpose is a mission statement for your life. Underneath that you'll find hard goals, and then clear goals and they're all sort of chunks of of the bigger thing but massively transformative purposes. came out of work that Peter Diamandis, myself and a guy named Salinas Valley was the original executive director of Singularity University, where they study exponential technology and how you apply to innovation, solving global challenges. We were doing a study, Selene pioneered it, of the 100 fastest growing companies in the world. And one of the things that we found is they all had massively transformative purposes. They're all and it was extremely well communicated to all employees. And I'm not talking about your like, crappy mission statement that you that you that you've wrote, I'm talking about, like, you know, this is Google, organize the world's information. It's something that everybody can focus on every knows where the company's going, and what what they're doing, etc, etc. Those are really really useful if you're if you're looking for passion, if you're looking for great if you're looking you need shared goals is a flow trigger, right as a group flow trigger, and as shared massively transformative purpose is a very powerful place to 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. I mean, I think about sports, right to be an individual sport, but if it's a team sport, big gymnastics, swimming, we talked about right? The flow that happens when your teammates start to win carry right through you and increase.

Steven Kotler: 33:08

This is Yeah, the other thing, by the way, is all the flow stuff. Flow is contagious. Emotions are contagious. There's a facial signature for flow. When we move into flow at a microexpression label level, your muscles are paralyzed and your smile monsters are hyperactive facial expressions because we're mirror neuron systems are automatic. So like I mimic your, your facial expressions, when I talk to you, this is how we bond right? This is, by the way, also why people start looking like their dogs. Since you have a dog in your office. I thought I'd mentioned this, right? Your dogs are actually better face readers than humans. They're always looking at your face, reading your emotions, and the way they can figure out what your feeling is they mimic your face to feel your feelings because that's how mirror neurons work. So why do your dog Why do our dogs end up looking like owners and owners like their dogs? Because you guys are mimicking facial expressions 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 are coming in. I know I can keep pumping these questions out. But Darryl Cardon, if you want to come off mute, and ask a question directly to students. Before we head into the q&a portion of this webcast. First, a brief note about p OE leadership from one of our members.

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Q&A from Audience: 35:01

You bet. Hey, Steven. Um, I love the book. One of the things about surprise that surprised me in it was when you talked about getting after your biggest and hardest task first, like implying that productivity was kind of a depleting resource like willpower. I was expecting that to read, you say that, like the dopamine, dopamine you would get from task completion would kind of act as a neurobiological leverage that would then help you get after a bigger task in a bigger task, where you kind of crescendo throughout the day, due to the neuro chemistry, can you 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 long time. I can absolutely. It's totally logical why you think that? And I don't? So I don't actually I don't I haven't had an answer. I've never heard the question asked before. And it seems totally obvious. Like, why isn't somebody to here's what I think is the answer. And I, the person, I need to call this word Baumeister who did all the work on willpower. He's probably the person that would have the best answer to this question. And it might already be in his data somewhere, though, I haven't seen it. What I'm what I think is this. And now let's say this is an 80 85% answer. And this 15% there, I'm probably way off base. But the cognitive load that comes from your hardest task, right, is usually so significant, that once you clear it out of the way, you end up delivering so much more energy for focus and attention. That that is probably coupled to the fact that willpower declines over time, put those two things together, and I would guess those forces are stronger than the dopamine high. Now, here's the couple of caveats that totally throw a wrench under all this. If your hardest task drives you into a really deep macro flow state. Cool, fantastic, you know, you'll get pushed all the way through the day. But let's say like, you can, one of the things that will drive flow is a little bit of domain, a little bit of delving to flow domains of focus and chemical, you start stacking up dopamine in the system. Now, if your tasks are two hours long, and whatever the domain is not delbene lasts about 20 minutes, so it's not gonna let linger long enough to do that. But if some of the tests are really short, there might be something to what you're saying, like there might be what I think is a general, my prescription is going to win over time. But there are going to guarantee you, if we were to look at this, they're going to be very specific kinds of situations, they may vary individual to individual. So there may be a prescriptive that I can say all this will work for everybody. I don't that that could be true. But I think there are going to be situations when your ways is better. I don't quite know what those are on one. Social, like if you have a really hard meeting, you're a salesperson, right? And there's a really tough customer, you probably don't want them to be your first customer. You right, you probably want a little bit of a groove. And some of that don't mean the pro social chemicals. So that's one situation where I can think, okay, I can see your way working better than you know, I mean, the way that we talked about in the book, it's what 30 years of, of kind of research and data has has told us, but it's sciences it you know it we overturn ideas all the time. So you asked a really great question. I don't have a great answer for you. I fumbled around my way. Roy Baumeister is going to be the person who does have that great answer. I think I'm now going to call him. It's a cool question that I hope my answer is satisfactory. I'm a little bit.

Leon Goren: 39:07

Great. Thanks for the question. I'm Tom Kay, I see on my screen, you want to come off mute and ask your question. And by the way, I haven't read the book, but I wanted to it's ordered so so it will be corrected. I just had a question in terms of the impulse possibility. So Google might have big goals, but they don't chase every one of them. Right. So I find these days in the marketplace. And I'm technology, people tend to tend to pivot very quickly because they get all these new technologies coming at them. So their real question is how to distinguish between you know, the practical component of chasing that big idea. And and you know, because you can't, you can't just chase everything that looks like the next great thing, right. So as Jeff some thoughts on how people filter those things,

Steven Kotler: 39:52

so if you're asking a business Technology question that answers probably in my book, The future is faster than you think, in terms of how do you track exponentially growing technology? Where is it going? What are the markets going to do all those? So there's that side of the question, let me stay on the human performance side of the question a little bit for you. Because that's a different thing. I think. I think there's two things that are important here. The first is, we all know, if we're good at business, that there's certain situations where the very best thing to do is to like walk away and start something, right, there are times you got to shut it down on this project. But Google, as you pointed out, Google kills way more stuff than they let live, right? They went when, when in in their skunk works in Google X, the ratio is crazy. It's like 100, to one in terms of what they kill versus what they let live. And there are a bunch of different organizational, you know, gateways to do that. You know, one of the things that we do organization with the flow research collective, and this is I have a different answer for you, but I'm just gonna throw this out, is when, when it comes to these things is I we put periodic guys making sure we're asking the questions that sort of don't allow us to, like, you know, everybody's trying to systematize things and streamline and that stuff. But every two to three months we have we have big meetings where we're like, okay, we built systems, we streamline we tried these processes. Now, what blind spots do we create along the way? And what are we totally not looking at? And let's reevaluate this stuff that way. So that's just one of the things we do. That's not my answer. My answer to you is on a more personal level, is this. The way I think about it from my own life is this. And what the research shows is that you want three tiers of goal setting, massively transformative mission statement goals, high hard goals, that are the chunks that feed into your mission statement. And then clear goals. What are you doing today, to feed into your higher goals to feed into your mission goals? So let's say one of your goals is to you know, make movies and inspire you know, audiences worldwide. That's your hot, that's your mission level goal. So you know, a high our goal would be go to film school, get a you know, make your first movie about cooking, make blah, blah, okay, you get the idea and clear goals. What am I going to do today to make that for right, that's how that's how the system works. But what those goals are, especially at the top is their filters. I have three mission level goals for my life. And then there's three things I have to do almost every day to support those goals. Right? And I know that those are my first filters, if a project comes my way. And it fits with those goals, great. I say yes, if it doesn't, it's gone. It's a waste of my time, because I'm driving in a certain direction. So one things about this level of goal setting as it becomes your first filter for your life. Predominantly, because I know if it's not aligned, my core mission, right, and my core passion, my core purpose, and all that stuff, there's no way I can be my best at it. So it should go out automatically. Because I, you know, I don't know how you play, but I try to play to be best in the world at things, right? If I can't be best in the world world at something or try to invest in the world at something. I'm not going to get into it. I'm going to say no. So I that's something more on a personal level. To do that, but like I do think that how to know when to walk away from a project is one of the very complicated, cool, interesting, difficult business and life questions that I don't I don't think we're 100% there yet. I really don't like it's like, you guys are asking great questions. And I wish I was smarter than I am. I've taken it as far as I can. But you know, you're smart. After reading guys are asking hard questions.

Leon Goren: 44:01

Thank you. I think I agree with you. I think you talked from a personal perspective, I think about corporate strategy match, right? Where you have the huge bags of the top goals that are laid down. It's a one pager and we filter ideas through that all the time. If it doesn't fit within the boxes in terms of direction where you're going, you can inquire you can ask questions around it, but that's one of the that's how I actually filter stuff to make sure that everyone is aligned driving towards a similar goal. Personally could do the same thing changing corporate strategy into a life GPS, which is a model moving forward. See me another question. Somebody asked me ask you this. They're on the treadmill. So I think Here we go. I think one of the most overlooked energy issues is in in order amount of time we spend using our precious mental energy on non priorities. We always think in terms of energy use in physical activities and not mental, the most productive and fulfilled people I know are masters of picking spots to you Is 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 mental energy. And it's not, your brain uses 25% of your energy at rest, it's 2% of your body mass 25% of your energy at rest, if you're focused and paying attention, especially if you're paying attention to something that you're, it's difficult, it's hard to pay attention to that requires, I think, where there's more stress, you're using a huge amount of energy, the level of stupid I am after an entire day spent writing, or in meetings, versus the level of stupid I am after an entire day spent skiing, or, you know, riding my bike, I'm way stupid, or after the cognitive stuff, just there's no way there's no way around. 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 be winning, you may be burning more energy than that I am right now talking 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 about this. This is also why across the boards, we see that you need seven, eight hours a night of sleep at night for peak performance. No questions asked. Sorry, I seem to have no worries.

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 you should also have an active recovery protocol in place. So don't finish to work and television, a beer, not active recovery. That's a passive requiring protocol that we think actually helps us recover and doesn't involve alcohol. If you have more than two cocktails, it's going to screw up your sleep patterns. It's going to rob you of this sleep, you need television. Because of how it affects our brainwaves. It makes us feel like we're relaxing. But the brain is actually not really relaxing. The brain reacts to television, as if there was a crisis almost every 30 seconds, you don't feel it at all. But at a break, we can you can see it in brainwaves. That's not recovery, to actually recover at the end of a long, hard work day, when you're kind of depleted on what the research shows is. You want something that will lower automatically lower cortisol and norepinephrine levels and body so flush out stress hormones, and alter brainwaves that dropped brainwaves from where they are high beta is where we are right now it's a fast moving wave. It's awake, alert, paying attention down to alpha Daydream much slower, that's what the brain needs to reset. So how do you do that? Epsom salt baths, restorative yoga. So this is not yoga for exercise. This is yoga like stretching and calm with breathing, focus, meditation practice of any kind. exercise can sometimes help those it's gardening or like a long walk, but a restorative practice at the end of your day that changes brainwaves and helps flush stress hormones out of your system. One, it's part, if you don't have it on, you will probably you're much more likely to burn out. In fact, there's a lot of work that we've done in the flow research collective that says if you have regular access to flow through what's known as your primary flow activity, and we'll come back to that for a second. And in active recovery protocol in place, and you're getting seven to eight hours of sleep at night, it's almost impossible to burnout. You can do it if you are in a beautiful boss who's super passive aggressive, who keeps moving the goalposts or a spouse or a situation where like, you can't please somebody and they that that situation, get out of it, you just you're gonna burn out no matter what. That's all. It's automatic. There's nothing you can do to win situations, just get the hell out of that situation. But primary flow activity is whatever that thing is that you've done your whole life that drops from the flow. For me, it's skiing. For other people, it's walking their dog and in nature or playing chess or dancing to salsa dancing, hip hop, or, you know, reading or doesn't matter. Take your pick. These are all the things that by the way we put down in adulthood, what's the first thing we become adults, we're responsible, we have families, we have jobs, we put away childish things. I'm putting away the surfboard or the skateboard or the whatever. And it's actually a disaster for performance for a bunch of different reasons. One is as we move into flow, there's a The stress hormones are pushed forcefully out of our system and happens automatically replaced by feel good performance enhancing neuro chemicals that also boost the immune system. So in a time COVID primary flow activities really matter because you're doing some good things for that. Also, the more flow you get, the more flow you get. So if you get flow skiing on Monday, you're training the brain to focus in a particular way, you're gonna get more flow at work on Tuesday, and the heightened productivity and heightened creativity. So productivity 500% above baseline creativity is 407% above baseline that seems to outlast the flow state by a day, maybe two. So great reasons to double down on your primary flow activity. But if you're fighting burnout, primary flow activity, if you can, an afternoon week is best, but even 10 minutes, you know, here and there is great, but like three or four hours a week is best, but that plus seven, eight hours of sleep a night plus like an active recovery protocol. So 10 minutes of focused meditation at the end of the day, or a 20 minute Infrared 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. Because in sports, when you train for that one big achievement, you train really hard to achieve that you get that flow you get in the moment, you flow through the whole process. But when you do break that record, whatever it is that you achieve, you find that people get depressed, like you go through a lull. And it's not allowed just for a day or two. Like I actually, personally I'll find this if I work hard. Two days later, I'm actually drawing big time. Big Event dropped down for months, and we see that mental illness with a lot of athletes. I gotta put that in the context of today, we've been battling COVID for nine to 10 months, right? As soon as it's done, and we've gotten through this thing. Well, you know, mental health is going to 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 because I've been saying this all along, we've been you one of the things about about flow is neurobiologically. Evolution, I think this is the brain reacting to crisis situations. That's why they evolve. So flow is sort of cost this work is custom designed for COVID. So I've been doing we've been doing a lot of hardcore, serious work with individuals and organizations around this very question. And yeah, you're totally right. So the thing is COVID itself is creating preconditions that are leading to stress, overwork and exhaustion, and what's going to happen as we all know, this disease is going to go away, it's going to go back to business as normal and you suddenly we're going to the world is going to change and what there's going to be a great time to make a lot of money, great time to be in business. But what if you're burned out by the time COVID ends up I mean, if you've ever been burned out before mental performance suffers it at a significant significant level. So we have told people during COVID doubled that you want to double down on your primary flow activity, your active recovery protocol. And what I said earlier that positive psychology is three great ways to sort of manage anxiety in any day, write a daily gratitude practice, a daily mindfulness practice or regular exercise, 2040 minutes a day, usually normal situations when we tell people's pick one a day, write gratitude practice takes five minutes, 10 minutes, over 11 minutes of focus, respiration, meditation, or 20 minutes of exercise, exercising until it's quiet upstairs, which is how you get the kind of mental health benefits during times of crisis, to these things a day or three of these things a day, depending on how hot your system is running. So you want to do that on the front end, you want to get seven, eight hours of sleep a night you want regular access to flow, you want an active recovery protocol in place. And if you're doing all four of those things, burnout is almost impossible. And then when it 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 talked about light exercise, and we're talking to the average person here. Mentally We're in the business world, we're not professional athletes. Is it light exercise, or is it hard exercise?

Steven Kotler: 54:05

Well, it depends if you're trying to if you're trying to train grit, that's hard or exercise, right if they if you're working on grit skills, but if you're cognitive fitness, you can a 2025 minute walk you literally like you're going to exercise until and lightly until it gets quiet upstairs, two things are gonna happen it's gonna get quiet upstairs, the voice in your head is going to get quieter and your lungs are gonna open up, you'll fill your lungs open up what those what those both reflect is a release of nitric oxide. It's a gaseous signaling molecule. It's in every cell in the body basically. And as an as as you kind of get to what's known as exercise induced transient hypofrontality means the prefrontal cortex D activates the part of your brain that's worrying and thinking all the time. It shuts down starts to shut that depends on your fitness level. If you're not fit at all. You can use the Get there with 2025 minutes of walking, right? slight uphill, slight, slight, slight uphill, usually is more than enough, you know, depends on your fitness level. For me, you know, I have to ski really hard for about 90 minutes to get there. That's what it takes. But, you know, I run around with professional athletes when I'm not, you know, doing this breaking bottle my frickin No, no, we're done breaking bones, there's no more that I put down childish things, at least, you know. Okay, that's not true. My shoulders separated right now, but whatever.

Leon Goren: 55:40

You know, it's been great. I know, the questions are rolling over. I'm respecting everybody's time. I promised that we'd ended up noon here. Steve, could you maybe leave us you got a sense of the audience got a bunch of questions, if they're the three things that you could leave with what we leave us with at the end of today's session that we should think about even slightly start to move us towards doing this. Because, you know, I read your book, I read through the activities at the end, we're all capable of doing this, the most of us will start and we're going to fall off the wagon within a month or two. It's, it's funny how. And it's not like any technology. This is just hard stuff to actually do. You've simplified it. But it is hard to actually 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 stuff until you start seeing the results. And the results are so spectacular. 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 research collective right, our training our course fundamental training is zero to dangerous. We see on the back end of is eight weeks long, it's hard as hell, don't kid yourself, right. But we see a 70 to 80% boost in flow on the back end, this stuff is amazingly easy to train, because it's our biology, and it's designed to work this way. So you can get spectacular results. And as those results right. Now, getting to the point that point, you're not wrong. And so normally, by the way, later on, when people ask me, what are the three things I can do Monday morning? My answer is always the same. Fuck off. Like, that's a ridiculous question. Like I don't whatever it is that you do for a living? Can you tell me how to be great at it with? What are the three things that allowed me to be great at your job? Right? That's a silly question to silly question 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 in moving the needle, on one of the greatest places to start is with three simple activities, I'm not going to go into too much detail on on how to do them, because in the art impossible, and we're running out of time. But first double down on your primary flow activity. We talked about this a lot today. It's really counterintuitive, but the results are really significant. So start there. The second thing is, flow follows focus flow has triggers what all the triggers do is they drive attention to the present moment. So the easiest place to start is with focus itself. With the research shows if you want to maximize flow, try to start your period your day with a period of uninterrupted concentration devoted to your hardest task. Now, start your workday. If you are a extreme Lark, like me, you get up really early. That means you do it at four o'clock in the morning, because that's when your circadian rhythms that you're most awake. If you're a normal person, and you're like most awake at 9am, that's when you do it. And if you're a night owl, like my wife, you want to start at like four or five o'clock in the evening. Just want to match your circadian rhythm with a with a period for uninterrupted concentration. prior to getting into that period, practice distraction management ahead of time. Don't try to resist temptation in the moment. What are you kidding more human beings, we don't resist temptation. We give into temptation. That's what it means to be human as far as I can tell. So phones get shut off, email gets shut off, Facebook, Twitter, instant messages, all those alerts you've got turn them all off at a time so you're not even tempted. And what the research shows is what you want to aim for. Now start with whatever you want to start with, right? If you've got 20 minutes today, that's what you start with. If you got 25 tomorrow, that's what you start with. But what you want to aim for over time is a 90 minute block fun interrupted concentration, because that's how long the brain is designed to naturally focus. We have 90 minute REM cycles, right? We all know this. We go into REM sleep, we dream for 90 minutes and then we come out. Same thing we have waking cycles, and they're $90.20 minutes long. So put this in context and give it familiar Montessori education, Waldorf education Montessori especially when they went looking for the highest flow activities on Earth. Montessori education is always very near the top. One of the reasons Montessori kids outperformed Waldorf Kids outperform other kids on pretty much every test you can give them. The amount of flow flow amplifies learning massively Montessori works really well that way. Why does Montessori produce so much flow? One of the reasons is built around 920 minute uninterrupted periods of concentration. They train the kids from four years old age to focus for that long. And the kids learn it really easily. Because your brain is actually you know how frickin add kids seem to you. But once you start training it, human brain is built to focus for 90 minutes at a time. So it becomes remarkably easy over time. So distraction management on the front end, 90 minutes or uninterrupted concentration, 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: 1:00:49

Not such a silly question. I love it. Well,

Steven Kotler: 1:00:52

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 compound interest. That's like right.

Leon Goren: 1:01:02

I love it. Steven, I want to thank you. Listen, all of you that joined us today. Obviously, there's something that piques your curiosity to come and join them to listen to Stevens, you've taken actually one of the first steps the second step I'd say is pick up his book because, I mean, Steven touched on a few things, but we didn't get to talk about learning, reading How important is we didn't talk about creativity, you know, moving from one winner idea to multiple and creating sustainable creativity. Just some great advice in there, Stephen and you've done incredible research on it. I'd urge you all really to pick up that book. Again, thank you for all joining us. Thank you Steven. If you're interested in another wave forward live webcast please visit us at p OE dash leadership comm you'll find a number of recorded past past webcasts and podcasts I've included Professor Rosa Beth Kanter, Professor Miko beer, both from Harvard Joe Jackman, Harry Kramer, Dr. Greg wells, Dr. Jason cell, Michel goldheart. The list goes on. In the months ahead. We have some incredible thought leaders joining us including Morgan housel, Kim Scott, Janice Stein, Erica Dhawan, in naming a few. It's an incredibly exciting lineup, be sure to join us. And please spread the word. And if you're interested, happy to introduce you to what an advisory board could look like. Send me an email. Until we meet again, I'd like to wish you all a fantastic day and a wonderful month of March. Don't underestimate your potential and Think Big thanks very much.

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