a recent gallup survey found that 83 of american workers are disengaged or actively disengaged on the job so four out of five of us hate what we do with the majority of our time the remainder have jobs that produce flow show up early stay late can't wait to be at work love the experience the high performers every organization wants to build on and the high performers every person really wants to be what does it take to do the impossible what does it take to level up your game like never before what does it take for individuals organizations for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting nothing is ever the same again breakthroughs our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance access the minds of maverick scientists ground-breaking innovators and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best perform your best and accomplish your boldest goals i'm your host rhian doris and together with best-selling author stephen kotler i present to you flow research collective radio [Music] so the rise of superman one of the coolest phrases and book titles i've seen uh what were you thinking when you named the book that well some of this book emerged out of you know i started my career as a journalist and this was in the early 90s and if you could ski your surf or rock climb or any of that stuff well action sports was just happening right in the mainstream level x games was going on and whatnot so if you could sort of do any of those things there was work i couldn't do any of those things very very well but i needed the work so i spent roughly the first five or six of my year of my years of my career chasing action adventure sport athletes around the world and being not a professional athlete myself i broke a lot of bones along the way and what kept happening was you know i'd be hanging out with guys and i'd see stuff that really you know it looked like absolute magic and the best example of skiing i started out all this i was i thought i was an expert skiing skier and the first time i actually got on a mountain with kind of pro what were then called extreme skiers each like i didn't even know what i was looking at they were doing stuff that it was not only was impossible it looked like it defied the laws of gravity impossible and i would break a leg or something like that and i'd go away for a year or two come back and the level of performance had jumped so startlingly far at the time i was gone that even if i had like struggled all that period to soar to catch up it was you know it was unfathomable again it was this huge kind of quantum leap and it kept happening and kept happening and kept happening and you know the only way you could describe it was kind of in comic book terms so the rise of superman kind of came out of watching kind of this progression in action in adventure sports and wondering what the hell was causing it that's awesome and then i love the theme through the book is look we're going to look at these extreme sports athletes and kind of decode what it is they're doing and then apply to our lives and your challenge in the book is i love the way you say you know the people involved in these exercises and activities rather are highly trained professionals so please please please try them at home do this you need to rise we need to rise if we want to meet the challenges that our world faces right well it was i mean you know it wasn't just action about support athletes what has happened kind of over the course of my career is i've gotten to study kind of high performing individuals everywhere whether it's kind of u.s navy seals to the action adventure sport athletes to you know top technology executives take your pick kind of across the boards and it really doesn't matter where we look right ultimate human performance has a signature shows up in the same way everywhere we look and it always presents as the state of consciousness we know as flow so the action of venture sport athletes got really good at flow but i realized we could kind of take what they were doing take the advances that neuroscience had made in the past 20 years of decoding this state and sort of work backwards from what they were doing to the mainstream that's awesome so let's go there so talk to us about flow which is the essential attribute that all these peak performers get into technically it's defined as a optimal state of consciousness it's a state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best and more familiarly it's those moments of wrapped attention and total absorption right where you get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears and it's got a number of strange characteristics so once things start disappearing our sense of self vanishes our sense of self consciousness goes away time passes strangely most of the time it speeds up and five hours will pass by in like five minutes okay usually it'll slow down you'll get that freeze frame effect familiar to anybody's been in a car crash or seen the matrix and throughout all aspects of performance mental and physical go through the roof so that that was that's your quick and dirty definition of flow yep and then what's so theoretically flow is the state and you walk us through the history in a really fascinating way from that earlier explorer to william james and cannon and uh maslow and six semi-high i want to focus on on more of what we can do to apply this stuff in our lives and leave the reader or listener to go check out the book for more of those details so you talk a lot in the book about the flow triggers and how we can get there i have some of my favorites but what are some of your favorite flow triggers to help us get into this state more consistently so the first thing to know kind of is is what i mean by flow trigger right these are preconditions that lead to more flow and more specifically flow is what happens right when all of our attention gets focused in the present moment right so what these triggers really are are there's 18 of them and they're the 18 things our brain thinks are most important in the world that evolution shaped our brain to pay the most attention to so when you're kind of hacking flow when you're playing with the flow triggers what you're really doing is using kind of basic evolutionary biology to your advantage i um and i think one of the reasons i i'm probably a good flow researcher is i actually have a very hard time getting into deep flow states i uh i am an action investor support athlete myself so i obviously risk is a great trigger right flow follows focus and you know consequences catch our attention so i i think physical risk is fantastic creativity is another flow trigger and you know i make my living as a writer and that's what i do almost all day every day and creativity is another flow trigger and what i mean by that is pattern recognition where ideas get linked together right we and we've all kind of had experience with this trigger underneath it is the neurochemical dopamine which is a performance enhancing feel-good neural chemical that say you fill out the right answer in a crossover puzzle right your brain connects some patterns together you get that right answer that little rust or pleasure you get is dopamine it drives focus and by driving focus it drives flow right so creativity in writing when you know sentences start coming together and the ideas really start pulling together that's probably my favorite trigger it's also probably the trigger that i think most people in the world depend on yeah that's awesome and one of my favorites is the uh the challenge to scale ratio and the flow channel i'd love to unpack that with you a bit more can you talk to us about for sure absolutely yeah it's a it's a it's it's kind of it's it's the big discovery the the challenge skills balance is what chick sent me high dubbed the golden rule of flow and the idea right flow follows focus so we may pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set right the important thing here is you want to stretch but not snap to put it emotionally flow exists near the midpoint between boredom hey there's not enough stimulation here i'm not paying attention and anxiety whoa way too much stimulation like you know i can't take it anymore in between is this sweet spot what's tricky about it is that for people who are not really used to pushing themselves very hard this sweet spot is the point at which you start to get uncomfortable right you're outside your comfort zone so you're feeling discomfort for really high performers the problem with the sweet spot is the exact inverse it's a lot lower than most people think it is and most people end up biting off challenges that are much much bigger than they should be and it creates too much fear and it actually blocks the state of flow which is the very thing they need most to achieve that challenge i love it and you you you use the the actual number four percent to capture this idea of look it's not 40 or 400 it certainly isn't 400 or 4000 or 40 000 percent don't snap just stretch four percent can you tell us about what that four percent kind of feels like from your perspective yeah first of all i gotta i gotta give you a little background on it because it's it came out of a calculation chick sent me high had performed with a google mathematician it was a total made-up number it was an exemplar right he was a back of the envelope thing and they were trying to figure out you know what is this ratio and they and so they did this back of the envelope calculation and i saw that and i thought wow that's unreal that's a lot lower than i thought it was going to be how surprising and i took it into the flow genome project and we sort of ran a loose study just like friends and family kind of study not nothing formal um usually with mostly with action adventure sport athletes because we found we could for example if you're a downhill mountain biker you could sort of figure out where you are and all the other features the jumps and the tricks and all the things that were on the mountain that you had you couldn't do and you would rate them how much harder percent wise than your current ability usually based on how much fear did they actually strike in your heart it was totally back in the envelope right what has happened since rise of superman has come out is that people that we work with in the flow genome project have done this more and more and more and more rigorously and really kind of gotten detailed with it and they've done it with kind of athletes at every level and people in society at every level and once again everybody has found even though it started out at the back of the envelope calculation that chick sent me i performed everything that we've done has borne it out so now we're actually on the front end of starting much more rigorous studies but the most important thing i think about that four percent is it's really it's liberating on the front end it actually ends up feeling a little bit like a prism on the back end let me explain the difference with four percent is it's a lot smaller than you think it is which is awesome you can wake up every morning and think today i'm going to you know write four percent harder than i did yesterday or i'm gonna you know push four percent harder you know on my research project than i did yesterday or you know however it is and you can sort of measure it out it's and go that way but what it really means is it's four percent day after day week after week month after month and it requires an extraordinary level of kind of emotional control and grit that is only possible because flow is such an amazingly feel-good high that you know this all this grit is worth it because the payoff is huge this is so good it's exactly where i wanted to go next which is you know it's four percent which is exciting as you said it's awesome that we can actually tap into that consistently can i be four percent more focused or four percent more efficient today or whatever the standard is and then show up day in and day out and let that compound effect overlaps time lead to as you say the impossible becoming what's for breakfast right or just another day at the office kind of thing whether it's laird hamilton starting at whatever size wave up to his monster wave um the other examples that you use and that leads us perfectly to another huge distinction that i loved of your kind of alternative theory on mastery and i joke well you call it the three m's right and i kind of jokingly called it m cubed right mothers uh musicians and marshmallows and then your path to mastery sans misery i just love so i'd love for you to kind of frame that for us then we can drill into it a little bit more well there are a lot of ideas on how do we get to mastery right and they all sort of come down to a lot of delayed gratification power a lot of self-control a lot of you know i'm going to be miserable for a really long time and i'm going to grind it out and if you look at action adventure sport athletes for example artists or you know people who have a lot of flow in their life that is not the approach they take at all they take a much more playful approach and the interesting thing is because their approach generates more flow so i won't go into a whole lot of neuroscience here but underneath a flow state one of the things that happens is the brain releases five or six of the most potent feel-good neural chemicals we can get our hands on one of which is dopamine we mentioned it a second ago flow is the only time you get this cocktail of feel-good drugs which means flow is the most addictive state on earth right it feels amazingly good that drives motivation that's fantastic which you know drives you farther and faster along the path towards mastery but equally important a quick shorthand for learning and memory and mastery is that the more neurochemicals that show up during an experience the better chance that experience has of moving from short-term holding into long-term storage one of the things neurochemicals do is they're sort of big neon signs over experiences saying really important save for later right flows this giant cocktail give big neurochemical dump as a result as a result learning goes through the roof you can massively accelerated learning in studies run by the us military they found that snipers and flow for example learned target acquisition skills 500 faster than normal a lot of other studies have backed this up and what it suggests is that those fabled 10 000 hours to mastery the science shows that flow can cut it in half so not only do you can be a lot less miserable along the way and you can get there a lot faster yeah that's awesome and then the important point you make and you quote um shane mcconkey who's got that great quote that you share of if you're doing what you love to do all the time then you're happy you're not going to work every day wishing you're doing something else i get up and go to work every day and i'm stoked that does not suck right that's so shame by the way that does not suck it's such a shame statement uh you brought him to life so well in the book um where where as you said and as maslow says right the dichotomy between work and play dissolves of what am i doing right now am i working or am i playing or you know there's no delay of the gratification because we're entering the most amazing state possible and as you said it makes our our desire to jump into it i think the phrase you used was feverish compulsion right where there's no delayed gratification the path is what we most enjoy doing um which also happens to accelerate the whole process of mastery right and you got to think about how important this really is across all walks of society we're talking about action adventure sport athletes but a recent gallup survey found that 83 of american workers are disengaged or actively disengaged on the job so four out of five of us hate what we do with the majority of our time the remainder have jobs that produce flow show up early stay late can't wait to be at work love the experience the high performers every organization wants to build on and high performance every person really wants to be amen so the question again becomes well how do we get into that right and i think that the you talk a lot about reframing things as well in the context of impossible etc and just the idea of you can reframe you don't need to follow these other alternate paths to mastery you just need to invest some energy into structuring your life such that flow is a more likely outcome for you more consistently right i appreciate the soft sell um it's i mean yes you're absolutely correct but it what we have seen consistently over and over is the people who are best at this put flow at the absolute center of their lives the corporations that are best at this the organizations that are best at this make flow kind of and producing more flow the primary and and let me kind of put some numbers around that so you can understand why mckinsey did a 10-year study of top executives in flow and they found that top executives are 500 percent more productive in flow than out of flow that's a step function's worth of change that's huge so patagonia which is a company that has kind of built their corporate philosophy around flow one of the ways they've done it is uh patagonia is run by yvonne chenard who is an ex-surfer and rock climber and their corporate headquarters is right on the pacific yvonne has a let my people go surfing house policy which means whenever the waves are up anybody anywhere in patagonia it doesn't matter if you're in the middle of a meeting you can walk out you can go surfing why because it doesn't matter if you take two hours off and go surfing you're going to come back and be 500 more productive and so then to be very clear they structured their entire lives i've soft-selled it before but let's be clear right they're structuring their entire lives around entering the state as consistently as they possibly can period yeah i and you know it's also what what i've done what you know my co my jamie wheel the co-founder of the flow genome project has done with his life and you know what everybody we've kind of we we've worked with over the years seems to have done as well so it doesn't it sounds a lot more extreme than i think it plays out as but yeah it's got it's fundamental and it become it becomes the center well and one of the things i talked about in the note um is is another idea from cheeks at mihai that i think you touched on a little bit but just the overall paradox of work we have this story that we want to be we're going to be happiest in leisure and the reality is we're happiest when we're engaged so just breaking that down and realizing no this is the avenue through which we're going to experience the optimal human experience alone kind of starts breaking down some of the the weird dichotomies that exist right well i think you know it i'm glad you brought that up because i think one of the fundamentals of of kind of flow hacking is the realization it takes a long time to kind of figure this stuff out and i think everybody sort of has to learn it for themselves i can talk about it but it's best experienced is that when it comes to actual high performance when it comes to generating flow a lot of the stuff that we've been led to believe really fundamental stuff like what do our emotions mean turns out for example with ultimate human performance a lot of your emotions mean the exact opposite of what you think they mean and let me give you a really clear example you gave you gave one about work and play but let me give you another example that i think's at the start of this so one of the things we know about flow is it's not a light switch it's not a binary you're not in the zone or out of the zone it's actually a four stage process and each stage there's precise kind of neurobiological changes underneath each stage you can't live in a permanent flow state because a lot of these couple of these stages are very unflowy and you have to go through all four stages before you can get back into a flow state so mastering the flow cycle alongside mastering the flow triggers is really key and the front edge of the flow cycle is a struggle phase and to understand the struggle phase the first thing you need to know is that what's happening in flow at a really broad big level is you're trading explicit or conscious processing for implicit or subconscious processing and you're doing this for a number of reasons primarily because the subconscious has is far faster and has far more ram than the conscious mind right but to get there on the front end you first have to load the conscious mind with all the material that you need your subconscious to be able to process you have to automatize a lot of skills to use kind of the formal term so the front end of a flow state is known as struggle because it is a loading phase you are loading and overloading the brain with information and by overloading what i mean it's a kind of a technical thing but you have a working memory it's all the stuff you can think about all at once and honestly it's very very powerful it can do a lot of cool things with the stuff you can think about but you can hold about four ideas in your head at once before the brain is overloaded so when you're trying to learn a skill it is very easy to get overloaded right when you're trying to write a report once you're kind of juggling more than four ideas it is very easy to get overloaded this is the struggle phase it is incredibly incredibly frustrating normally we think of frustration as bad i'm really really frustrated i've got to stop i'm going the wrong direction in this work it is a sign that you're moving in the right direction so even though it feels like crap what it actually means is you're doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing and you're moving in the right direction good job keep going i love it and it's actually the next idea i wanted to talk about which is you describe it as fear slash frustration slash pain becomes our compass it's not something we try to get around we realize wow that's the edge the four percent i need to lean into if i want to enter this flow state consistently on a micro level right now and on a macro level as i build my skills right fear is another one exactly where we're you know we believe that fear means turn around run away go the other direction because that's what it feels like right but in fact what you learn in this work is there are obvious exceptions of course but usually exactly what you're looking for is on the other side of that fear so you have to move through it and what happens is you gain a very good compass in life fear if something is really scaring you that's the direction you need to go in yeah i love that one of the guys we love phil stutz and barry michaels who wrote a great book called the tools their first tool is this they call it reversing desire where rather than avoid the things that you're afraid of or find painful frustrating you say bring it on and you know your potential is on the other side of them but i love the way you frame it where it's four percent we don't need to go crazy here that's the big lesson is you have to be uncomfortable but it is a manageable level of uncomfortability and in fact you we we see this from the action sport at least we see this from kind of u.s spec ops and even in business people who feel like the misnomer is the adrenaline rush right if you're talking about action sports most athletes if they're feeling adrenaline they're feeling too much fear it's a sign that they should back off this is outside their challenge skills sweet spot they need to save it for another day and what we're saying here is yeah yeah so we we have a healthy relationship so much that comes to my mind as you describe that um it's so liberating combined with what we just talked about of just give it time compound that uh over an extended period of time you can do extraordinary things related to that is the word impossible so how we get to the the state of being able to do the impossible consistently which is really a theme of your life's work right with flow with bold with abundance it's how do we approach these impossible challenges and realize we can do a heck of a lot more than we think and you use the story of roger bannister to bring the point home um can you talk to us about that word impossible and how you approach it and how you recommend we approach it so i talked about banister because there's something called the banister effect which is this very peculiar so roger bannister right first guy to run the four minute mile and if you look at history look at the kind of top mile times it was we went down by a tenth of a second a year basically for 50 years right it the last 10 seconds of getting that mile of getting to the four minute mile took forever and then banister broke the record and within 10 years four or five other people had run four minute miles including a teenager so the question is what the hell is it about like finding out that the impossible might be possible that makes it suddenly possible right the physical challenge of running a four minute mile had not changed it's still a four minute mile the mental challenge had changed the barrier had fallen and why is that and what does it mean and a lot of it has to do with that four percent sweet spot we've been talking about a lot what happens when you hear something is possible if it's in your field for example and so it's not it's not like you hear laird hamilton served a 50-foot wave and you've never surfed before in your life so you think about that and go oh that doesn't make any sense that's not how could you do that that's bigger than godzilla right it's what happens when people already at the top of their game hear that somebody else has done something impossible and they start thinking about it and the minute you start thinking about it you fire up the brain's pattern recognition system and very quickly that thinking leads to well what's it going to feel like when i do it you end up sort of accidentally visualizing the impossible as possible for yourself and since we know visualization's got a 100 year history of training up the brain's ability to do these kind of things and there's a long process that involves flow and a lot of other stuff but the end result is literally hearing that the impossible is possible makes it so much easier on a certain level that seems to suggest the trick to pulling off this stuff it's figuring out how to convince yourself in the first place that the impossible is possible for yourself and then to have the diligence and the patience to step back and realize that's not a snap your fingers go forward tomorrow kind of thing right the adrenaline of look that's a sign to back off not assigned to lean in but when we have the maturity to say look i'm going to dedicate my life to pursuing this and i'm going to take it one baby step at a time um as you said the impossible iteratively becomes possible and it's just that you do the next day at work right absolutely yeah that's great um what idea do you love that we have not discussed what idea do i love that we have not discussed well one other thing yeah so since we want to make this the most useful for people i want to talk about the back end of a flow state for a second so we've talked about a four stage process struggles on the front end a couple other stages in the middle with the third stage being flow on the back end of flow there is a recovery period and this is something else that people get really really wrong two things are important about the recovery period first we talked about those neural chemicals that show up and flow those turn out to be expensive for the brain to make and we have a limited supply and you need certain vitamins and minerals and sunshine et cetera et cetera et cetera to produce them so you go from this enormous hive oh my god i feel like superman to a very deep low on the back end you have to you need some more emotional fortitude some grit to kind of go through that low again this is you know it's a low that you can't treat like a low and what's important about this is a couple of things one if you go start getting stressed out about the fact that you no longer feel like superman you will start producing cortisol it's a stress hormone it blocks long-term potentiation it blocks learning so you'll get the short-term performance boost to flow but you won't get the long-term accelerated benefits of mastery right it cuts you off from that stuff the other thing is it's physically exhaustive to be in a flow state it just takes a lot of energy and if you're not recovering on the back end you're not going to be able to start the cycle over again how do you go from a recovery period where you're not recovering into the deep deep fight that is struggle that comes next very very tricky and this is another thing we see kind of in the world today very very frequently in business teams will come together they'll generate amazing flow states they'll pull off something fantastic you see this in technology all the time in startups and the minute they get through the other end right they've generated all this flow they've done something amazing they get through the other end and the boss says oh that's fantastic that's great now do it again uh twice as fast with half the resources and there's no recovery period yeah and you know it's problematic and i'll give you one final stat to sort of drive this home about you know a lot of what we do here is we put sleep monitors on people we make sure people are really getting eight hours of sleep a night because you do put sleep monitors on most people you find that most people get about 6.8 hours of sleep and you need that extra couple of hours and to drive this home my favorite study uh that's been done on this a baseball team that travels three time zones to play a game with time zones being a measure of sleeplessness before the first pitch has been thrown out they only have a 40 chance of winning wow push hard and recovery equally hard um so can you give us a quick example of how you approach flow so like something going on in your life and just how you've structured your life so we can bring it to life in the context of how you're showing up for sure so the one of the most important things is obviously flow follows focus right you need uninterrupted concentration for flow schedule big periods of uninterrupted concentration i get up every day at 4 00 am i'm not saying everybody should get up at 4am but i get up at 4am and from 4am until about 8 30 is when i do most of my writing that's the bulk of my writing because writing demands float demands focused and nobody calls me at that period of time i turn my phone off i turn my email off my cell phone's not even with me that sort of thing i you know i actually have blackout curtains and kind of white noise filters everything i can to drive focus and help me pay attention so it sounds like such a simple thing but uninterrupted periods of concentration 90-minute blocks if you can schedule them are fantastic and i think it's got to be the most important thing i do right on can you tell us about the back end of that because i too get up super early and i go to bed super early so what do you do the night before such that you can wake up at four feeling great well i go to bed early and there are you know so the most important thing i think is when i end my day i end my work day i want to start so you're i'm going to back you into this years ago i was reading an interview with gabriel garcia marquez and he said something just absolutely brilliant he said i always stop writing at the time i'm most excited and i thought to myself well that's ridiculous because the time you're most excited you've got your ideas or flow what do you why would you stop then what i realized is that usually by the time you notice that you're most excited um you've only got for me to would just put it in writing terms i've only got a couple paragraphs left in me those paragraphs are not worth trading the excitement for i would rather wake up the next day fired up already my brain's excited i've already got some of that focus some of that play energy and i start by you know reading and editing the stuff i wrote the day before because it gets me fired up again so by the time i'm facing the blank page i've already got excitement in the body is actually norepinephrine and dopamine they're both focusing chemicals they're both flow triggers so i try to end my day at the point i am most excited about kind of what's coming the next day i always make a list so i know and i don't have to wonder what is the order of my day one of the things i've discovered is that most professionals are pretty good at low-grade flow states we can focus we know how to if you're successful you've learned how to focus as a general rule what trips people up is the transitions between tasks so what i do is i have a list and i've i don't allow myself to get tripped up by the transitions when i'm going from task to task if i am not as focused as i want to be i will stop i'll do kind of mindfulness breathing meditations bring my focus back into the present if that doesn't work i will do five minutes of physical exercise and then i will come back and i've edited out the transition between things i try to keep my focus you know crisp you know that way as well so good it's so it's so simultaneously genius and mundane uh well that's the problem with the flow stuff is that when you really look under the hood ultimate human performance because our neurobiology when it plays out in the real world it's not that complicated yeah right these things are yeah the consistent application of the obvious right and i think it's the depth of maturity to see look i'm not going to get all this achieved in one night and it makes no sense for me the biggest shift has been i stopped my day digital sunset sun goes down i'm done all electronics off everything's done and for exactly the reason you described i wanna i i know how good it feels to wake up feeling all those uh chemicals within me and just to crush it in the morning and i've had a great day before the family wakes up that's awesome you know but i would do nothing to jeopardize that yet that took me forever to get to the the awareness on and i think creating those boundaries stopping when we're exciting leaving some in the tank and honoring consistency over an artificial intensity that leads to snapping and burnout and you gotta you you know i don't think everybody is as lucky as us and that they have schedules where they can get up super early and just do it that way and if that's not the case you need to have conversations with spouses and bosses and co-workers you do they need to know what you're doing and why you're doing it most people get it you're like look i'm going to be 500 more productive leave me alone for a few hours right this is what i'm doing right now have the conversations out loud it sounds again so simple makes a huge difference yeah that's awesome and then create the time blocks and just and and then again baby stop it we're not waving a magic wand here and uh suddenly you're in one long four stage flow state all the time right yeah it's the same iterative four percent just get four percent better today compound that over a year you're going to be way better give it a decade and let's see where you're at it's going to be extraordinary right let me i'll i'll put it in really concrete terms so for me with writing 350 words is how much i can produce no sweat under you know no toil conditions on any circumstances i haven't slept for three days i can still give you 350 good words don't worry about it 500 words though that extra 150 words is what happens when an idea an idea a full idea well expressed takes about 350 words i've discovered you can go longer for sure and turn into a chapter or whatever but that by the time you get to 500 words if i'm moving the reader through what i'm talking about i've linked a second idea together and that forces me to stretch i have to make i have to write that transition i have to make that connection and on top of the fact that it makes me stretch it makes me a little uncomfortable or 600 words say i usually have to have some pattern recognition to bridge that gap so by forcing myself to stretch i'm also forcing myself to make a connection between ideas in an unusual way which is going to kick ward dopamine into my system and i'll i could end up writing a thousand words 2 000 words but all i'm going for is 500 words amazing and then for me anyway my life has become just putting myself in the state such that i can most gracefully and powerfully do that because if i don't sleep for let alone three days if i get six hours of sleep or even seven hours of sleep i feel it i'm so oh i nobody's no i am i totally agree nobody's worse than me had six hours of sleep i just give you 350 good words but i can't put together a coherent sentence out loud yeah if you could only give one piece of advice to someone passionate about optimizing their lives um what would that be and it could be something we've already discussed or something outside of that what would that one piece of advice be well i'm gonna uh i'm gonna quote uh scottish philosopher thomas carlisle on this one who 300 years ago said no pressure no diamonds i i the thing about flow is it requires risk-taking right not not a lot of it but it requires it requires risk and i you know i i that fail forward fail faster silicon valley motto certainly applies here steven i appreciate you people can learn more about you where's the best place stevencottler.com and theflowgenomeproject.org if what you've heard on flow research collective radio has been helpful please consider doing us a solid and leaving us a review on apple podcast spotify or wherever you are listening to this reviews help us connect to a wider audience so we can get these peak performance principles out to more people you