Achieving Flow and Overcoming Mental Chaos

Have you ever felt like you're constantly bouncing from one task to another, never quite sure if what you're doing is actually moving you closer to your goals? Well, there's a science-based way to break free from this cycle and tap into a state where your daily efforts align perfectly with your longest-term aspirations and vision. Now, I'm Rian D'Ars, co-founder and CEO of the Flow Research Collective. We've trained everyone from Audi, Accenture, and the U.S. Air Force to use neuroscience-based principles to access flow states at will. Now, when I was 13, I had a surprising amount of purpose and direction in my life. I was training to be a world-class rugby player. I was weight training with monk-like discipline six days a week and I was surfing with religious dedication and these pursuits were a tunnel through which my attention and energy could be funneled. The world made sense because it all revolved around a destination, my future on that rugby field. Then everything changed. A head injury nearly killed me. For a year I couldn't get out of bed. There would be no more rugby. No more surfing. Even a 30-minute walk became a serious challenge and for six years I was chronically debilitated. Blurred vision, amnesia, barely able to function at all. But worse than the physical pain was the hollowness in my chest. By the time I was 15, two years into that accident, my mind started to subtly unravel. There were no goals anymore, no future point to orient my consciousness around and make meaning out of the day-to-day with. The identity that I had built disintegrated. I was unmoored, lost and unclear on who I was, what I was here to do and why it was even worth waking up in the morning. And one day on the way to school, I had an overwhelming impulse, an image flashed in my mind. Me hopping off the train, disappearing into the fields beside the train on the way to school and just walking and walking and walking until I couldn't take another step. The vision was to sleep under a tree, wake up and start walking again and repeat. I just wanted to break. free of everything in a single desperate act. And there's a name for this sort of aimless, chaotic seeking, this desperate grasping for something that feels perpetually out of reach. I was experiencing what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called psychic entropy. Now, psychic entropy refers to the natural tendency of our consciousness to drift into a state of disorder, chaos, and even despair if it is left unstructured. Csikszentmihalyi argues that psychic entropy is not just a temporary state. It's actually the human mind's default setting. Without direction, our consciousness wanders aimlessly. We ruminate on past mistakes, worry about the future, get lost in unproductive daydreams and overwhelmed with existential angst. It's like a leaf being tossed by the wind. No direction, no control, and a nagging sense of wasted potential that compounds on itself every day we spend in this state. And the pain of knowing you have more to give, but not knowing how to unlock it, eats away at you. With every misaligned action, confidence erodes, and you start to question your worth. Especially as you see others who seem to have clarity and properly channeled ambition, with their lives seemingly all figured out. Now there are two main ways to address psychic entropy. Internally, through mastering the mind with meditation, mantra, and prayer. The second is externally, by finding a goal or a focal point outside of ourselves that we could orient to so as to bring order to our consciousness. For most, the external approach is more practical, easier to implement. And there's a surprisingly simple way that peak performers use this external approach to structure their consciousness so they can ignore distraction, mitigate existential angst, and channel their energy with precision. We'll cover that in a moment. But at the peak of my psychic entropy as a teen, lost, confused, identity-less, I read a musty old self-help book that had survived my mom's last bookshelf purge. For the first time in ages, something clicked. The book was about goal setting and how setting goals can help you focus. Classic self-help kind of stuff. It seemed simple enough. I thought maybe it could work. I just needed a different goal than becoming a professional rugby player, given my current condition, my inability to exert or function with the head injury. And I picked a goal as distant as can be, fairly arbitrarily. I decided I'm going to become a doctor. At the time, That felt like my way out, a path back to stability. As I committed to that goal, something interesting happened. The chaos in my mind slowly began to recede. As this sense of purpose, this desire to become a doctor increased, my conscious experience became increasingly harmonious. I studied harder. I ate healthier so that I could study better. I became more selective with who I spent time with. I even slept more diligently with all of my behavior starting to recalibrate with intentionality around this goal. Each chunk of previously disorganized experience in my day started clicking into place, orienting toward this north star of eventually becoming a doctor. I had discovered the surprisingly simple way all peak performers structure their consciousness and bring harmony to the human condition. as articulated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi decades ago, and it's called becoming goal-directed. When you become goal-directed, you gain the quality of being purposefully oriented towards specific long-term goals. As professionals approach work like a pinball, they're bouncing around from one task to another, ricocheting off obstacles and distractions. With goals, you're a guided missile, locked onto your target and empowered to conquer them. Beyond that, becoming goal-directed is a prerequisite for flow state. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the man who popularized the term flow state, puts it, when an important goal is pursued with resolution and all one's varied activities fit together into a unified flow experience, the result is that harmony is brought to consciousness. Someone who is in harmony, no matter what he does, no matter what is happening to him, knows that his psychic energy is not being wasted on doubt, regret, guilt, and fear, but is always usefully employed. Goal-directedness funnels attention. organizes experience and imbues life and the human condition with meaning, extinguishing the thrashing pain of psychic entropy. It's also a prerequisite for peak performance and access to flow state. You simply can't perform at your best if your consciousness isn't structured through goals. The goals are the pipe through which your consciousness flows. Without goals, there's no flow. Goals activate your prefrontal cortex, enhancing decision-making and focus. They reduce the negative chatter of your brain's default mode network. combating worry and rumination and most importantly goals light up your brain's reward centers giving you a sense of purpose and fulfillment as you progress toward them now interestingly as i became goal directed as a teen i didn't end up becoming a doctor but that's not the point it doesn't matter so much that the initial goal is accurate as you'll see one of the biggest blockers to becoming goal directed and the peak performance writ large is wanting to feel certainty around the goal you're pursuing and it being the right one for you Instead, what matters most is structuring your consciousness with a goal, sometimes any goal. Now, becoming goal-directed is just the starting point, the peak of goal-directedness. It's when as high a percentage of your daily actions as possible are tied directly to your long-term vision. That's what we're about to cover. Now, you might have a decent idea of what your goals are already, but we're about to dive far beyond goal setting. We're about to build you what's known as a goal stack. The goal stack... It involves you building out direction and goal all the way up from an unattainable, infinite purpose, down to what are called goal-directed actions that you'll execute on a weekly, daily, hourly, even minute-to-minute basis. I've put together a free guide that reveals the three key pillars of becoming goal-directed, so you can access flow state more regularly and boost your performance. To access the free guide, just click the link in the description below and you'll be able to download it right away. And you want to think of this goal stack. as a set of stairs that you construct, with the right structural integrity to lead you to the eventual end state. Each step has to actually lead to the place you want to go. If a single step is missing, you can't get to your destination. And for most people, their ultimate goal remains a lofty idea in their head, with no staircase, or one that's partially finished leading nowhere. To avoid this, we'll ensure each goal builds upon the one before it. We'll architect this goal stack together based on each of these layers. First off, we've got purpose, which is an overarching reason for your pursuits. Then there's high hard goals. Then you've got your annual goals, breaking down your high hard goals into what you can achieve within a given year. We've got quarterly goals, monthly goals, and the weekly goals. And then of course, we have to execute these on a daily basis. Now, don't worry if this seems a little overwhelming. I'm going to take you through it step by step and show you how to actually construct this so you can become goal directed so that you're always living and working in a way that's on track towards your greatest goal. This brings us to the First preliminary step for building your goal stack, which is to expand your possibility space. Now, growing up in Ireland, my little brother, Caelan, and his friends shared a passion for rugby. They were equally skilled, but as they grew, their paths took wildly different turns. One of the boys set his sights high. He wanted to play for his local county team. Given his skill, he believed this was possible. He trained accordingly, following a standard regimen and playing in local leagues. His actions aligned with his belief, and he achieved his goal of making the county team. The other boy dreamed even bigger. He told the other two boys that he planned to play for the provincial team. He knew it would take much more practice, but he believed it was possible. So he sought out better training. He traveled further for tougher competition. He invested his savings in higher quality equipment, all thanks to his expanded thinking, his belief that he could reach the provincial team. But my brother Cailin, he was a little different. As an eight-year-old, he didn't just dream of county or provincial glory. He saw himself captaining the Irish national team, even competing in the World Cup. It was a ludicrous goal for a little kid, a kind adults would dismiss with a condescending smile. But because he believed this seemingly impossible future was possible, He didn't just train harder, he uprooted his life, taking actions that the other two boys would never have even conceived of as worth taking or possible to take. Caelan sought out legendary coaches that pushed his body to the limit. His expanded belief in what was possible led him to Blackrock College, a renowned institution known for producing elite rugby talent. Without this expansive belief, Caelan wouldn't have taken these actions. He easily could have peaked. Playing rugby against his friends or the local team, he simply wouldn't have seen any other option as viable. And years later, as I watched Caelan lead the Irish national team and play in Paris for the Rugby World Cup, I marveled at the width and expansiveness of his conviction and how it had led him to this point. He had turned an improbable goal into a reality. And it struck me that these three boys all started with the same raw skill. The difference was in what they believed they could become, their possibility space. Their internal map of what they saw as possible for themselves dictated the roads they saw and the routes they dared to take. The bigger your thinking, the wider your possibility space. This concept, possibility space, comes from complexity science. And possibility space refers to the full range of potential states or outcomes that a complex system could occupy. Similarly, your possibility space holds your belief about the potential paths your life could take. The career outcomes that you see as viable for yourself. the relationships you think you could realistically engage in, the skills you feel you may be able to possess. Think of it like the beam of light you use to navigate the world. It determines what you can see and what remains hidden in the shadows. Like a flashlight, the first boy could only illuminate a narrow possibility space. The boy who played for the provincial team, he had a wider flashlight, spotlight, revealing more of the possibility space, but still leaving some areas unexplored. Kalen's floodlight, however, bathed every corner in light, exposing paths to extraordinary success that others might have dismissed as impossible. And again, it's not that Kalen had more resources or talent. He was just an eight-year-old. He's my little brother. He simply had a larger sense of what was possible and worthwhile. His possibility space turned what looked like unrealistic options or actions to the other boys into viable ones for Kalen that he ended up pursuing, which ended up resulting in that extraordinary outcome. Another example of How your possibility space determines your reality can be seen with Elon Musk. Elon Musk's wildly ambitious goal of making humanity a multi-planetary species stems from his expansive possibility space. He believed it was possible to establish human life on Mars. This belief opened up previously unseen options, such as flying to Russia to speak with rocket engineers and calculating the cost difference between raw materials and assembled rockets. Elon Musk's belief in radically cheaper rockets led to the Falcon 1. Its success fueled more launches, more data. and ultimately the first commercial spacecraft to dock with the ISS. This relentless pursuit of lower costs paved the way for reusable rockets, a feat Musk achieved with the Falcon 9. Today, the same belief drives the development of Starship, a reusable spacecraft designed to carry humans to Mars. However, if Musk had a narrow possibility space, he might have just taken his PayPal fortune and decided to invest it in a fairly boring, tame SaaS company. Or if he had a slightly broader possibility space, maybe he would have focused only on incremental improvements to NASA's efficiency, rather than pioneering a transformative approach to space exploration. Without his expansive possibility space, Musk wouldn't have taken the actions that revealed the solution that ultimately ended up matching his vision. The possibility space is the invisible force that shapes our lives. It determines what you see as possible to pursue in the first place. The actions that are available to you to follow. And of course those actions that end up creating the outcomes. that are available to you or not. So when building your goal stack to become goal-directed, you want to expand your possibility space. Otherwise, you will create blindness to options that would unlock order of magnitude greater outcomes. Now, here are three ways to expand your possibility space. First, there's belief contagion. Belief contagion, also known as social contagion, is the most widely recognized way to expand your possibility space. It turns out that all of those old self-help quotes you've probably heard, like, show me your friends and I'll show you your future, you become the five people... you spend the most time with or proximity is power, they're actually accurate at a neurological level. The science shows that beliefs are stored in the same part of the brain as social interaction, which is why surrounding yourself with people who have a larger possibility space can be transformative. Your brain's ventromedial prefrontal cortex acts kind of like a belief vampire, strengthening beliefs that match what you already think and changing beliefs when faced with new information, especially when it comes from credible sources. It matches what your social group believes or triggers an emotional response. This shows just how much our social interactions and connections shape what we believe, and proximity to people drives belief expansion or contraction more than almost anything else. The second way To expand your possibility space is through brute force big thinking. Just pushing yourself to do what Kalen did. To think big by asking questions like, what would 100 times this goal or outcome look like? Or, what would I attempt if I knew I couldn't fail? What goals have I dismissed as unrealistic or impossible? Philosopher and psychonaut. Terence McKenna, who explored the outer edges of human consciousness and returned to rave about what he saw, liked to ask this really simple but profound question. What would I do if I could do anything? And bear in mind, a good guy can do anything. goal is impossible to reach with current resources. Imagine a startup, a new company with three team members. What if they set goals based on the assumption that this company would always only have these three team members? That would be absurd. When a business sets long-term goals, it assumes it will add resources, people, capital, capabilities to make the goal a possibility. Assume the same for yourself. You may not have the knowledge, the skills, the work ethic, the traits, the connections, the resources to hit your goal right now. now, but don't set the goal as limited by that. Assume that you will amalgamate them along the way as you go. If you set goals based on current resources, skills, contacts, abilities, whatever it is, you're forever going to be anchored to these and limited by them. Instead, set goals that seem impossible. Given your current situation, your resources will change en route to the goal. From there, your big thinking will become easier over time through goal attainment, which will expand your self-efficacy. third way to expand your possibility space. Through goal attainment and building self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is your belief in your ability to achieve goals. Simple as that. As you set and achieve goals, your possibility space expands, like running towards a receding horizon line. Each success reinforces and expands your possibility space, allowing you to set and achieve even bigger goals. Take Elon Musk, for example. Building and selling his first company, then founding and selling PayPal expanded his possibility space. He didn't start with the goal of sending humans to Mars. But each success made that seemingly impossible goal achievable, thus widening his possibility space. This is why it's so key to have a goal stack in the first place. You have to set goals in order to become goal-directed, but you also have to set them in order to attain them, so you can build the increased self-efficacy, the reinforcing sense that you can achieve goals, which will lead over time to a bigger possibility space and bigger and bigger goals from there on out. And this brings us to the next step of building your goal stack. The difference between a dreamer and a doer is the dreamer stays stuck in the big thinking, not knowing what steps to take next. Even with big thinking, they remain a leaf in the wind, fantasizing rather than executing. One of the main reasons dreamers don't achieve their goals is that the goals weren't reverse engineered such that there's alignment between your minute-to-minute actions and your decade-to-decade vision. The goal-directed doer bridges this gap by reverse engineering goals. This involves starting with a desired outcome or goal and working backwards systematically to determine every necessary step to achieve that outcome. This brings us to the second step, which is reverse engineering your goal stack. Now it's time to actually build out your goal stack. This is what will orient your consciousness and structure it for flow state. But to orient you again, here's another quick overview of each layer of the goal stack. We've got that infinite purpose, then high hard goals, annual goals, quarterly goals, monthly goals, weekly goals, and daily goal directed actions. And we're going to reverse engineer from an infinite and intentionally unattainable purpose all the way down to the actions you need to take hour to hour. First, let's pinpoint your purpose. Now earlier, I told you how at the age of 13, I experienced a head injury that had profound effects on my mental state. And how stumbling across that book on goal setting gave my life direction. Just before I stumbled upon the book, I was at the peak of my psychic entropy as a teen. Lost, confused, identity-less. Reading books about life's purpose. And this led me to believe that purpose was a static entity, something that you discover through introspection. But this approach left me plagued with endless uncertainty. Then, having struggled with my health so much, I decided I wanted to help others with theirs, so I chose to pursue becoming a doctor. In doing this, my understanding of purpose began to shift. I realized that purpose isn't necessarily something that finds you. Rather, it's something that you simply choose and then iterate upon as you engage with life. In other words, I realized that purpose is static. More a verb than a noun. It's something you do, not something that you have. I didn't need to find it in a treasure chest lying deep in my psyche. It's subject to constant revision and may change with the seasons of life. It's not something to overly identify with or even get overly anchored to. It's a functional tool. So instead of finding my purpose, I realized that I could just pick a problem. I asked myself, what's something messed up about the world? that I wish wasn't so messed up that I resonate with personally and the idea that anyone out there could struggle with their health like me bothered me and this changed everything. It instantly lowered the stakes around finding some lofty purpose and gave my life direction becoming a doctor. As I said before even though I didn't end up becoming a doctor in the end it gave my life meaning purpose and direction and creative movement and momentum. This approach actually reminded me of rugby. How the hell do you know what position you're best at on the rugby field? without getting on the field. You've got to get into play. There's no way to know, but once you're in play, your role will self-correct and clarify itself fast. The assumption that conviction, certainty, and confidence in your goals or direction are prerequisites to determining a direction is a misconception that seriously hinders progress, limits potential, and wastes years of many people's lives. So here's the rule. Pick a problem, not a purpose. Ask, if I could change one thing about the world, what would it be? Maybe it's something you see personally with your friends, family, or the world at large. The key is to not overthink it. This also addresses the common problem of picking a niche for would-be entrepreneurs. For example, you're walking along a beautiful beach, but instead of pristine sand, you find it littered with plastic bottles that is washed ashore. The problem here is plastic pollution in the oceans. Your potential purpose is to create a world where oceans and marine life thrive free from the negative impact of human activities. Or you see a news report about a community where children have to walk miles every day just to collect water from a polluted river, risking their health and missing out on school. The problem? Access to clean water. Your potential purpose? To build a world where basic human rights are respected and upheld for all. Or maybe your friend has been struggling with depression, but they're afraid to seek help because they don't want to be seen as weak or crazy by others. The problem here may be mental health stigma. Your potential purpose is to ensure that every person on earth has the resources they need to live a healthy and dignified life. Or you might already be working on a problem you've picked. Maybe you're an athlete and you want to advance the frontier of human performance. Maybe you work for Google and the problem you're picking is to pursue their mission of organizing the world's information. The key here is to realize that clarity about your direction in life is a choice. It's similar to ordering food off a dinner menu. Maybe you come to the restaurant and you already know what you want, but the chances are, if you're like most people, you don't. You get there, you look at the menu, you order something, and then you eat. Believe it or not, it's kind of similar with choosing a direction or a purpose in life. Some people come to life knowing what they want to eat on the menu, or they figure it out really early on, but most have to look at the menu and just pick, unsure how it's actually going to taste. Just pick so you don't become starved with purpose. And over time, the problem you pick can evolve into a purpose. All right, so you've picked a problem to give your life purposeful direction at a high, broad level. Now let's turn your purpose into a plan through reverse engineering. The next step is to set what's called a high-hard goal. To illustrate how to set high-hard goals, consider the strange case of the man who ate an airplane. The first time he swallowed glass, he was nine years old. Thus began Michel Latito's fondness for eating dangerous objects. In 1959, gastroenterologists examined him. His condition? Pica, a taste for unusual non-nutritive items. This launched an incredible career. Monsieur Majdeau, Mr. Eat-It-All, which was his nickname, was known to eat two pounds of metal every day. How? Well, he would reduce metal objects into smaller pieces and keep his throat lubricated with mineral oil. Throughout his career, his diet included 18 bicycles, 7 TV sets, 2 beds, 15 supermarket trolleys. One must wonder what was going through his mind as he munched through the 14th trolley, by the way. A computer, a coffin, including the handles. Skis and six chandeliers. But the pinnacle, in 1978, he ate an entire Cessna 150 aeroplane. More precisely, he began eating it in 1978. It was a piece-by-piece process that took two years. In 1980, he emerged victorious from the battle of man versus flying machine. Now, how the hell did he do this? How did Michel manage to pull this off? Well, he used the same process we're going to use for architecting your gold stack. Reverse engineering. Reverse engineering turns large goals into small achievable steps. It clarifies the tiny tasks involved in achieving a titanic goal and sets a timeline to get them done. But first, what is your high-hard goal? What's your equivalent of Michel's airplane? Well, in the 1960s, Dr. Edwin Locke conducted groundbreaking research on goal setting and motivation. He found that setting specific challenging goals led to higher performance than setting easy, vague, or no goals at all. Locke's research laid the foundation for understanding the psychological mechanisms behind motivation and performance. Then the term high-hard goals, coined by sports psychologist Dr. Stanley Beecham in California, encapsulates the type of goals that Locke found most effective and that can facilitate flow experiences. High hard goals are both challenging and require significant effort, pushing individuals to the edge of their abilities and demanding full concentration and engagement. A high hard goal is an ambitious long-term objective that takes one to five years to achieve. High hard goals force you to grow and develop new skills. When you pursue high hard goals, you create the conditions necessary for entering flow state and achieving optimal performance. And Michelle... Mr. Edol's story eating the airplane was the high-hard goal. Michel deconstructed the parts of the plane with its subcomponents. Then he started with the most manageable part, ground it down, and then took his first spoonful of lead. You want to do the same with your goals, from airplane to spoonful of dust. Now let's ground it with another example. Suppose you want to start a billion-dollar climate tech company. Your high-hard goal could be build a climate tech company that reaches a valuation of a billion within five years. To achieve this high-hard goal, You need to reverse engineer it and break it down to smaller annual goals. The high-hard goal is your airplane, but we need to work backwards from the outcome and grind it down to a spoonful of dust in order to eat it. Using this example, here are some example annual goals. Year one is to validate problem and solution, to develop prototypes and secure initial funding. In year two, maybe you want to build a team, refine the product, establish partnerships. In year three... You decide you're going to scale the business and secure significant funding. Now you can see that each year builds upon the previous one. The next step is to take the year one annual goal and break it down into quarterly goals. Here are examples of what your quarterly goals for the year one may be. Maybe you decide that in quarter one you're going to conduct market research, identify target market, and then define the problem to be solved. And in quarter two, based on the defined problem, you're going to develop a prototype solution and gather user feedback. Maybe in quarter three... You're going to refine the prototype based on user feedback and each quarter builds upon the achievements of the previous one, creating a logical progression towards the ultimate goal. Now continuing with our reverse engineering, let's create monthly goals that directly support the Q1 goal. Month one, maybe you identify target market and conduct 40 customer interviews to gather insights about their needs and pain points. In month two, maybe you analyze interview data to identify common themes and define a clear problem statement. And maybe month three, you ideate. potential solutions to the defined problem and craft a unique value proposition that sets your solution apart. Now next, let's plan weekly goals that directly lead to achieving the month one goals. Week one, maybe you decide you're going to create a customer interview script and identify 50 potential interviewees who fit the target market criteria. Week two, you're going to conduct the first 10 customer interviews using the script you get the idea for week three and for week four by ensuring that each level of the goal stack directly supports and leads to the next. Completing each goal sets the stage for the next, much like dominoes falling in a precisely planned sequence. Now bear in mind, as you do this, you don't want to get too caught up in perfecting every detail up front. Your reverse engineering doesn't need to be flawless. Things will become clearer as you move forward. Think of it less like waterfall project development, where you plan out everything in detail before even starting, and then follow that plan exactly despite learning new things, and much more like the lean startup approach. You set a direction. But you hold the plans lightly, refining as you go. The act of moving ahead will illuminate the right path. The skill is to approximate as close as possible to what the next step may be and as far as possible out in the chain. Of course it's not going to be perfect, you can't read the future, but you want to map it out in a lot more detail than most do regardless. So don't put too much pressure on yourself. Sketch out your best estimation of the reverse engineered sub-goals needed to reach your high hard goals. With that in mind, at this point you should have built out a goal stack comprised of a series of steps that lead to your high hard goal. With the goal stack, you've anchored yourself to a goal to structure your consciousness, the first step in becoming goal directed. But now, how do we convert this goal stack into daily, hourly, and minute by minute actions that actually lead us up the staircase and attain that critical minute to decade alignment? Well, this brings us to the absolute core driver of peak performance and productivity, which is to commit to your goal. The goal-directed actions. Now that you've built your goal stack, you've given some longer-term structure to your consciousness. You still have to deal with what to do at any given moment, what's right in front of you. You still have to deal with the demands of the day and the dozens of decisions that come along with that. How do you ensure that the actions you take and what you work on will actually lead to you reaching your goals? Well, think of your productivity as a car. Elite performers spend nearly all their time driving directly to their destination, taking the best route possible. On the other hand, most people... spend a tiny percentage of their time actually driving directly to the destination. 90% of it is spent driving in circles down cul-de-sacs, turning down the wrong roads, or crashing into trees and having to reverse. To illustrate this, I remember during my early years in business. I was at a business mastermind that powder mounted in Utah. I was observing two different entrepreneurs who had the same goal of building their business to eight figures in the same industry. And I'll keep their names private, but here's a snapshot of how they spent their day. Entrepreneur A wakes up and spends 15 minutes wondering what the most important thing might be to work on, then takes a break from wondering about it and answers all her email. That has a hunch that it might be good to improve her branding because one of the emails she just responded to mentioned the branding. in her company has some room for improvement. So she spends 90 minutes on that. Then she gets a call from her team and oversees what they're doing. Then decides it could be good to explore expanding their social media presence. So she spends a few hours researching vendors, calling a few of them up. But then she decides not to continue with that. She's floating through her day like a leaf in the wind without clear direction or orientation around goal-directed actions. While entrepreneur B knows that from the day before, the single goal for the business right now for this quarter is to increase lead generation. She also knows that for this month, the single most important way to do that is to focus on the most effective marketing channel, which is Facebook ad. She also knows that the most important way to improve Facebook ads is by rewriting all the ad creative. So she sits down for three hours, drops into flow, and rewrites every ad, sends them out to her team members to implement, and then ties up the rest of the loose ends and finishes her day. The night before, she had determined everything. And before checking anything, she attacks that one thing that she knows isn't it. thing that will drive her toward that goal of getting her business to eight figures. So think of your goal stack as a towering stack of dominoes. To topple a whole structure, you need to identify the one key domino that will trigger the best cascading chain reaction. Unlike everyday tasks that keep you busy but not truly progressing, these are the tasks that directly propel you toward where you want to go. With maximum speed, these domino toppling tasks are called goal-directed actions. A goal-directed action is simply The action that will progress you more toward a given goal than any other possible action conceivable. It's an action that, when completed, directly brings you one step closer to your high-hard goal, or whatever goal it is that you're pursuing. It's the domino that knocks down the next domino in line most effectively. Tasks that aren't goal-directed action are the equivalent of being hamster on a wheel. There's a lot of activity and movement, but ultimately the hamster isn't going anywhere. Performing goal-directed actions while in a flow state is the cornerstone of peak performance. Now as you're learning about goal setting I want to quickly tell you about a goal we have for the channel which is to get to a million subscribers by the end of the year. We're growing rapidly and we think we're going to be able to do it but only with your help and if you're able to help us pull that off we will release a free chapter of our upcoming book on flow at the end of the year when we hit the million subscribers. Thanks so much for your support, much love and go ahead hit subscribe so we can continue leveling up your ability to access flow state with more consistency and reliability. Once in flow, within a goal-directed action, our productivity and creativity increases. So we are both working on the best possible thing we can work on to lead us directly to the goals in our goal stack, while also in the most effective state of consciousness possible in doing the work. Goal-directed actions also ramp up what's called perceived importance. Perceived importance is the personal significance we assign to an activity. This alters our neurochemistry, increasing dopamine, which heightens your motivation. commitment and concentration, leading to greater attention paid to the task when you perceive it as more important, which in turn leads to faster entry into flow state. So the more goal-directed your actions are, the greater the dopamine release, the more flow you will get, and the easier it will become to get into a flow state in the first place. And this is much of the reason why we focused on developing a minimum viable purpose by picking a problem within the goal step. Purpose increases the perceived importance of the task, the meaningfulness of the given goal-directed practice. our attention and drives us into a flow state. At this point, you've grasped the significant impact that goal-directed actions have on entering flow state and boosting your productivity. So how do you know what your goal-directed actions are? Well, that brings us to the last step in becoming goal-directed, which is to separate planning from doing. Most professionals approach their work like shotgunners against a herd of zombies in a video game. They fray and spray and fray, having to react to every zombie as a matter of life or death. When you become goal-directed, you become more like a sniper. You're high up in the sniper's net, able to survey the whole landscape on your time. With no hurry, you can take a deep breath, hone in, and then bam, knock out the target with maximum efficiency. To move from reacting to deciding, we need to separate planning from doing, each of which require different modes of cognition. Divergent thinking is creative, where we link disparate... far-flung ideas to form something new. On virgin thinking, it's when our attention narrows in on a single thing. Both states are critical, but they don't blend well. altogether. We want to use one or the other. Diverge when planning, converge when doing. Separating these two brain states through separating planning from doing frees us to act without questioning whether or not what we're about to do is the best thing we could do. Now according to Dr. Kahneman's dual process theory, our cognition involves two distinct systems. The fast, intuitive system one for doing and the slow analytical system too for planning. Separating planning and doing allows each system to function optimally without interference. And John Sweller's cognitive load theory posits that our working memory has limited capacity, and trying to plan and act simultaneously increases cognitive load, the amount of information we're trying to hold in our minds at any given time, which dramatically impairs performance and blocks flow. Conversely, decreasing cognitive load increases our ability to slide into a flow state. So separating planning from doing is critical. Because it also eliminates reactivity. The more strategic you are, the less often reactionary tasks will occur. You then get to treat each goal-directed action as an event. This clarity reduces overwhelm and prevents you from working excessive hours. And it improves your quality of life immensely. You don't need to do as many things when you find goal-directed actions that maximally advance you towards your goals. All the wasted effort that is non-goal-directed can start to drop away. Now as things get overwhelming and busy, we want to invest even more in planning. To do this, at the end of each workday, take 10 minutes to plan tomorrow's goal-directed actions. This will ensure you are always working on the most goal-directed actions while in flow state, which amplifies your productivity while working on those goal-directed actions. Think of it kind of like a power-down ritual. There's a few steps to it. The first is to avoid goal drift. This step involves revisiting your goal stack. Review your long-term goals at the end of each day. The purpose is to check your daily activities against your high hard goals. to ensure alignment. It helps in identifying goal drift deviations from your long-term objectives so you can course correct. This review acts as a compass keeping you truly focused on what matters most. All you do here is pull up your goal stack and make sure that you're on course hitting your goals based on all of the reverse engineering you've already done. The next step in the power down ritual is to line up the dominoes. This is where you find and line up the dominoes such that you can flick one and it'll knock down the next and the next most effectively. Identify the three Maximum three most critical goal-directed actions for the following day. These should be tasks that have the greatest movement toward your long-term goals that you can possibly conceive of. These tasks should ideally be challenging yet achievable, aligning with your skills. To do this, take the weekly goals you've identified as part of your goal stack and break them down as a daily goal-directed actions. What we'll do here is focus on one to three critical tasks, no more than three. Each day, they'll move you closer to your weekly target. Building an arc. example of a climate tech company here are the example daily goal directed actions for week one of the goal stack monday it might be to draft customer interview scripts create a list of 50 potential interviewees tuesday it might be to revise and finalize our interview script based on team feedback and prioritize our top 20 interviewees and find contact info and so forth for wednesday and onward now daily goal directed actions turn your high hard goals into bite-sized achievable tasks the next part is to set clear goals. Each goal-directed action. Clear goals are a quintessential flow trigger. Unlike bigger goals, like those you set on a daily and weekly level and beyond, a clear goal is an action to take, like kicking a soccer ball into the net, not broad outcomes like winning the soccer match. Now the trouble most people have when trying to set clear goals is they don't set them anywhere near clearly enough. The key is to set wildly specific clear goals for each of your big goal-directed actions. That way... The brain doesn't have to expend resources on wondering how, why, or what to do. To achieve this, you want to break the task down into micro goals, even if the task will only take an hour. This way, you get a steady drip of dopamine. For example, maybe the first step is to write the intro to the presentation. The second clear goal is to add the data from past client results into the presentation. Third clear goal is to design the graphics with our brand colors. This doesn't need to take long. You can write these clear goals down within 60 seconds. Then take the first step to the first step. Building on the presentation example, the first step to the first step is opening up a word processor, titling the document, and saving it in the right folder. Part of your power down ritual, when you map out your goal-directed actions with these wildly clear, minuscule clear goals within the task, and take the first step of the first step, you can dive right into work the next day and get it to flow. Think of it like having a personal trainer in the gym. All you need to do is lift the weight, they move you to each machine, load up the weights, and all you need to do is push. Compare this to wandering around the gym. trying to configure different machines, wondering how many sets you should do of each thing, how much weight you should add, whether you did too many bicep curls or not enough legs. on and on and on. Clear goals are what help you turn goal-directed actions into something similar. The final step of this power down ritual is to clear out any undone tasks and tie down all loose ends so you have a free and clear runway for working on goal-directed actions the next day. The average knowledge worker never does anything close to this power down ritual. At best, they'll make a somewhat arbitrary bullet list on a Monday often determined by a superior or whatever mood they happen to be in in the moment. It's not at all anchored to their long-term vision. It's not reverse engineered. and it's not scheduled into the calendar so that it actually gets done. On the other hand, the most elite performers on Earth are the most goal-directed. That's just how it is. There's a conscientiousness about how each moment is being spent and the degree to which it actually has to be thought out as to whether it will move the maximally forward or not, and a level of violent attack on those goal-directed actions that leads to extreme accomplishment. The degree to which you are effective at identifying goal-directed actions is the degree to which you will minimize wasted effort and maximize goal attainment with minimal sacrifice. The aim is to make sure that every hour of the day is disproportionately allocated toward goal-directed actions. Building your goal stack gives structure to your consciousness. Goal-directed actions ensure that what you are working on now will lead you up the goal stack to where you want to be in the far future. And clear goals give us a target for our attention and drive us into flow. Living your goal stack is the way you maximize minute-to-decade alignment. which structures your consciousness and gives your moment-to-moment consciousness harmony by anchoring it within the context of a goal even if that north star is decades away from the present moment it harmonizes your consciousness to tie all of this together here's a model for becoming goal directed by leveraging the three key pillars of being goal directed your goal stock goal directed action and clear goals for flow the goal directed pyramid aligns aspiration with action and attention picture this You're standing at the base of a massively inspiring pyramid. The pyramid is your guide to achieving your most ambitious aspirations and living a truly fulfilling life. First off, you've got the base of the pyramid, which is your goal stack, the aspiration. The base of the pyramid is your purpose, a meaningful problem to solve that fuels your ambition. Above this foundation is a staircase of progressively smaller blocks, your high-hard goals, broken down into annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly targets. This is your goal stack, with each level supporting the one above it. linking daily actions to long-term aspiration. Then you've got the core, your goal-directed action. At the pyramid's heart, a glowing path of stepping stones ascend to the apex. Each stone is a goal-directed action, a high-impact task that propels you forward and creates a domino effect of progress. The stones shine brightly, contrasting the dimmed surroundings, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing goal-directed actions over less critical activities. And then you've got the summit, your clear goals, attention at the pinnacle. A focused light beam illuminates the path representing your clear goals, the specific actionable sub-steps for each goal-directed action. This light shows the immediate next action to take, providing exact directions to initiate flow. It symbolizes how clear goals command focus, eliminate ambiguity, minimize distractions, and enable deep concentration. End each day with a power down ritual. Review your goal stack, plan tomorrow's goal-directed actions, and set clear goals. Start each day with your most important goal-directed actions. Clear. Letting clear goals guide you into a flow state. Regularly review and realign actions with aspirations or correcting as you move forward. Because getting into the deep now through flow requires clarification of the far future. And to build the far future, you need time in the deep now, deep in a flow state, producing your greatest work. The deeper the flow state you experience now and the more what you work on in that flow state ties to shaping the far future, the more goal-directed you are. It imbues your actions with meaning and responsibilities, the antidote to apathy, the cure from boredom and anxiety, and revitalizes a directionless life into one of clarity and fulfillment. Now if you want to take this deeper, there's a way to power up your long-term goals with intrinsic motivators. That way, no matter what kind of external progress you're making towards your goals, you still have unwavering consistency and motivation to keep climbing. Click the video on screen to find out how.

Now, when I was 13, I had a surprising amount of purpose and direction in my life. I was training to be a world-class rugby player. I was weight training with monk-like discipline six days a week and I was surfing with religious dedication and these pursuits were a tunnel through which my attention and energy could be funneled. The world made sense because it all revolved around a destination, my future on that rugby field.

Then everything changed. A head injury nearly killed me. For a year I couldn't get out of bed.

There would be no more rugby. No more surfing. Even a 30-minute walk became a serious challenge and for six years I was chronically debilitated. Blurred vision, amnesia, barely able to function at all. But worse than the physical pain was the hollowness in my chest.

By the time I was 15, two years into that accident, my mind started to subtly unravel. There were no goals anymore, no future point to orient my consciousness around and make meaning out of the day-to-day with. The identity that I had built disintegrated.

I was unmoored, lost and unclear on who I was, what I was here to do and why it was even worth waking up in the morning. And one day on the way to school, I had an overwhelming impulse, an image flashed in my mind. Me hopping off the train, disappearing into the fields beside the train on the way to school and just walking and walking and walking until I couldn't take another step.

The vision was to sleep under a tree, wake up and start walking again and repeat. I just wanted to break. free of everything in a single desperate act. And there's a name for this sort of aimless, chaotic seeking, this desperate grasping for something that feels perpetually out of reach. I was experiencing what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called psychic entropy.

Now, psychic entropy refers to the natural tendency of our consciousness to drift into a state of disorder, chaos, and even despair if it is left unstructured. Csikszentmihalyi argues that psychic entropy is not just a temporary state. It's actually the human mind's default setting.

Without direction, our consciousness wanders aimlessly. We ruminate on past mistakes, worry about the future, get lost in unproductive daydreams and overwhelmed with existential angst. It's like a leaf being tossed by the wind.

No direction, no control, and a nagging sense of wasted potential that compounds on itself every day we spend in this state. And the pain of knowing you have more to give, but not knowing how to unlock it, eats away at you. With every misaligned action, confidence erodes, and you start to question your worth.

Especially as you see others who seem to have clarity and properly channeled ambition, with their lives seemingly all figured out. Now there are two main ways to address psychic entropy. Internally, through mastering the mind with meditation, mantra, and prayer. The second is externally, by finding a goal or a focal point outside of ourselves that we could orient to so as to bring order to our consciousness.

For most, the external approach is more practical, easier to implement. And there's a surprisingly simple way that peak performers use this external approach to structure their consciousness so they can ignore distraction, mitigate existential angst, and channel their energy with precision. We'll cover that in a moment.

But at the peak of my psychic entropy as a teen, lost, confused, identity-less, I read a musty old self-help book that had survived my mom's last bookshelf purge. For the first time in ages, something clicked. The book was about goal setting and how setting goals can help you focus. Classic self-help kind of stuff. It seemed simple enough.

I thought maybe it could work. I just needed a different goal than becoming a professional rugby player, given my current condition, my inability to exert or function with the head injury. And I picked a goal as distant as can be, fairly arbitrarily.

I decided I'm going to become a doctor. At the time, That felt like my way out, a path back to stability. As I committed to that goal, something interesting happened. The chaos in my mind slowly began to recede. As this sense of purpose, this desire to become a doctor increased, my conscious experience became increasingly harmonious.

I studied harder. I ate healthier so that I could study better. I became more selective with who I spent time with.

I even slept more diligently with all of my behavior starting to recalibrate with intentionality around this goal. Each chunk of previously disorganized experience in my day started clicking into place, orienting toward this north star of eventually becoming a doctor. I had discovered the surprisingly simple way all peak performers structure their consciousness and bring harmony to the human condition.

as articulated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi decades ago, and it's called becoming goal-directed. When you become goal-directed, you gain the quality of being purposefully oriented towards specific long-term goals. As professionals approach work like a pinball, they're bouncing around from one task to another, ricocheting off obstacles and distractions.

With goals, you're a guided missile, locked onto your target and empowered to conquer them. Beyond that, becoming goal-directed is a prerequisite for flow state. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the man who popularized the term flow state, puts it, when an important goal is pursued with resolution and all one's varied activities fit together into a unified flow experience, the result is that harmony is brought to consciousness. Someone who is in harmony, no matter what he does, no matter what is happening to him, knows that his psychic energy is not being wasted on doubt, regret, guilt, and fear, but is always usefully employed.

Goal-directedness funnels attention. organizes experience and imbues life and the human condition with meaning, extinguishing the thrashing pain of psychic entropy. It's also a prerequisite for peak performance and access to flow state.

You simply can't perform at your best if your consciousness isn't structured through goals. The goals are the pipe through which your consciousness flows. Without goals, there's no flow.

Goals activate your prefrontal cortex, enhancing decision-making and focus. They reduce the negative chatter of your brain's default mode network. combating worry and rumination and most importantly goals light up your brain's reward centers giving you a sense of purpose and fulfillment as you progress toward them now interestingly as i became goal directed as a teen i didn't end up becoming a doctor but that's not the point it doesn't matter so much that the initial goal is accurate as you'll see one of the biggest blockers to becoming goal directed and the peak performance writ large is wanting to feel certainty around the goal you're pursuing and it being the right one for you Instead, what matters most is structuring your consciousness with a goal, sometimes any goal.

Now, becoming goal-directed is just the starting point, the peak of goal-directedness. It's when as high a percentage of your daily actions as possible are tied directly to your long-term vision. That's what we're about to cover.

Now, you might have a decent idea of what your goals are already, but we're about to dive far beyond goal setting. We're about to build you what's known as a goal stack. The goal stack...

It involves you building out direction and goal all the way up from an unattainable, infinite purpose, down to what are called goal-directed actions that you'll execute on a weekly, daily, hourly, even minute-to-minute basis. I've put together a free guide that reveals the three key pillars of becoming goal-directed, so you can access flow state more regularly and boost your performance. To access the free guide, just click the link in the description below and you'll be able to download it right away.

And you want to think of this goal stack. as a set of stairs that you construct, with the right structural integrity to lead you to the eventual end state. Each step has to actually lead to the place you want to go.

If a single step is missing, you can't get to your destination. And for most people, their ultimate goal remains a lofty idea in their head, with no staircase, or one that's partially finished leading nowhere. To avoid this, we'll ensure each goal builds upon the one before it.

We'll architect this goal stack together based on each of these layers. First off, we've got purpose, which is an overarching reason for your pursuits. Then there's high hard goals. Then you've got your annual goals, breaking down your high hard goals into what you can achieve within a given year.

We've got quarterly goals, monthly goals, and the weekly goals. And then of course, we have to execute these on a daily basis. Now, don't worry if this seems a little overwhelming.

I'm going to take you through it step by step and show you how to actually construct this so you can become goal directed so that you're always living and working in a way that's on track towards your greatest goal. This brings us to the First preliminary step for building your goal stack, which is to expand your possibility space. Now, growing up in Ireland, my little brother, Caelan, and his friends shared a passion for rugby. They were equally skilled, but as they grew, their paths took wildly different turns. One of the boys set his sights high.

He wanted to play for his local county team. Given his skill, he believed this was possible. He trained accordingly, following a standard regimen and playing in local leagues.

His actions aligned with his belief, and he achieved his goal of making the county team. The other boy dreamed even bigger. He told the other two boys that he planned to play for the provincial team.

He knew it would take much more practice, but he believed it was possible. So he sought out better training. He traveled further for tougher competition.

He invested his savings in higher quality equipment, all thanks to his expanded thinking, his belief that he could reach the provincial team. But my brother Cailin, he was a little different. As an eight-year-old, he didn't just dream of county or provincial glory. He saw himself captaining the Irish national team, even competing in the World Cup. It was a ludicrous goal for a little kid, a kind adults would dismiss with a condescending smile.

But because he believed this seemingly impossible future was possible, He didn't just train harder, he uprooted his life, taking actions that the other two boys would never have even conceived of as worth taking or possible to take. Caelan sought out legendary coaches that pushed his body to the limit. His expanded belief in what was possible led him to Blackrock College, a renowned institution known for producing elite rugby talent.

Without this expansive belief, Caelan wouldn't have taken these actions. He easily could have peaked. Playing rugby against his friends or the local team, he simply wouldn't have seen any other option as viable. And years later, as I watched Caelan lead the Irish national team and play in Paris for the Rugby World Cup, I marveled at the width and expansiveness of his conviction and how it had led him to this point. He had turned an improbable goal into a reality.

And it struck me that these three boys all started with the same raw skill. The difference was in what they believed they could become, their possibility space. Their internal map of what they saw as possible for themselves dictated the roads they saw and the routes they dared to take. The bigger your thinking, the wider your possibility space.

This concept, possibility space, comes from complexity science. And possibility space refers to the full range of potential states or outcomes that a complex system could occupy. Similarly, your possibility space holds your belief about the potential paths your life could take. The career outcomes that you see as viable for yourself. the relationships you think you could realistically engage in, the skills you feel you may be able to possess.

Think of it like the beam of light you use to navigate the world. It determines what you can see and what remains hidden in the shadows. Like a flashlight, the first boy could only illuminate a narrow possibility space. The boy who played for the provincial team, he had a wider flashlight, spotlight, revealing more of the possibility space, but still leaving some areas unexplored.

Kalen's floodlight, however, bathed every corner in light, exposing paths to extraordinary success that others might have dismissed as impossible. And again, it's not that Kalen had more resources or talent. He was just an eight-year-old.

He's my little brother. He simply had a larger sense of what was possible and worthwhile. His possibility space turned what looked like unrealistic options or actions to the other boys into viable ones for Kalen that he ended up pursuing, which ended up resulting in that extraordinary outcome.

Another example of How your possibility space determines your reality can be seen with Elon Musk. Elon Musk's wildly ambitious goal of making humanity a multi-planetary species stems from his expansive possibility space. He believed it was possible to establish human life on Mars.

This belief opened up previously unseen options, such as flying to Russia to speak with rocket engineers and calculating the cost difference between raw materials and assembled rockets. Elon Musk's belief in radically cheaper rockets led to the Falcon 1. Its success fueled more launches, more data. and ultimately the first commercial spacecraft to dock with the ISS.

This relentless pursuit of lower costs paved the way for reusable rockets, a feat Musk achieved with the Falcon 9. Today, the same belief drives the development of Starship, a reusable spacecraft designed to carry humans to Mars. However, if Musk had a narrow possibility space, he might have just taken his PayPal fortune and decided to invest it in a fairly boring, tame SaaS company. Or if he had a slightly broader possibility space, maybe he would have focused only on incremental improvements to NASA's efficiency, rather than pioneering a transformative approach to space exploration. Without his expansive possibility space, Musk wouldn't have taken the actions that revealed the solution that ultimately ended up matching his vision. The possibility space is the invisible force that shapes our lives.

It determines what you see as possible to pursue in the first place. The actions that are available to you to follow. And of course those actions that end up creating the outcomes.

that are available to you or not. So when building your goal stack to become goal-directed, you want to expand your possibility space. Otherwise, you will create blindness to options that would unlock order of magnitude greater outcomes.

Now, here are three ways to expand your possibility space. First, there's belief contagion. Belief contagion, also known as social contagion, is the most widely recognized way to expand your possibility space.

It turns out that all of those old self-help quotes you've probably heard, like, show me your friends and I'll show you your future, you become the five people... you spend the most time with or proximity is power, they're actually accurate at a neurological level. The science shows that beliefs are stored in the same part of the brain as social interaction, which is why surrounding yourself with people who have a larger possibility space can be transformative. Your brain's ventromedial prefrontal cortex acts kind of like a belief vampire, strengthening beliefs that match what you already think and changing beliefs when faced with new information, especially when it comes from credible sources. It matches what your social group believes or triggers an emotional response.

This shows just how much our social interactions and connections shape what we believe, and proximity to people drives belief expansion or contraction more than almost anything else. The second way To expand your possibility space is through brute force big thinking. Just pushing yourself to do what Kalen did. To think big by asking questions like, what would 100 times this goal or outcome look like? Or, what would I attempt if I knew I couldn't fail?

What goals have I dismissed as unrealistic or impossible? Philosopher and psychonaut. Terence McKenna, who explored the outer edges of human consciousness and returned to rave about what he saw, liked to ask this really simple but profound question.

What would I do if I could do anything? And bear in mind, a good guy can do anything. goal is impossible to reach with current resources. Imagine a startup, a new company with three team members. What if they set goals based on the assumption that this company would always only have these three team members?

That would be absurd. When a business sets long-term goals, it assumes it will add resources, people, capital, capabilities to make the goal a possibility. Assume the same for yourself. You may not have the knowledge, the skills, the work ethic, the traits, the connections, the resources to hit your goal right now.

now, but don't set the goal as limited by that. Assume that you will amalgamate them along the way as you go. If you set goals based on current resources, skills, contacts, abilities, whatever it is, you're forever going to be anchored to these and limited by them. Instead, set goals that seem impossible. Given your current situation, your resources will change en route to the goal.

From there, your big thinking will become easier over time through goal attainment, which will expand your self-efficacy. third way to expand your possibility space. Through goal attainment and building self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is your belief in your ability to achieve goals. Simple as that.

As you set and achieve goals, your possibility space expands, like running towards a receding horizon line. Each success reinforces and expands your possibility space, allowing you to set and achieve even bigger goals. Take Elon Musk, for example.

Building and selling his first company, then founding and selling PayPal expanded his possibility space. He didn't start with the goal of sending humans to Mars. But each success made that seemingly impossible goal achievable, thus widening his possibility space.

This is why it's so key to have a goal stack in the first place. You have to set goals in order to become goal-directed, but you also have to set them in order to attain them, so you can build the increased self-efficacy, the reinforcing sense that you can achieve goals, which will lead over time to a bigger possibility space and bigger and bigger goals from there on out. And this brings us to the next step of building your goal stack. The difference between a dreamer and a doer is the dreamer stays stuck in the big thinking, not knowing what steps to take next.

Even with big thinking, they remain a leaf in the wind, fantasizing rather than executing. One of the main reasons dreamers don't achieve their goals is that the goals weren't reverse engineered such that there's alignment between your minute-to-minute actions and your decade-to-decade vision. The goal-directed doer bridges this gap by reverse engineering goals.

This involves starting with a desired outcome or goal and working backwards systematically to determine every necessary step to achieve that outcome. This brings us to the second step, which is reverse engineering your goal stack. Now it's time to actually build out your goal stack.

This is what will orient your consciousness and structure it for flow state. But to orient you again, here's another quick overview of each layer of the goal stack. We've got that infinite purpose, then high hard goals, annual goals, quarterly goals, monthly goals, weekly goals, and daily goal directed actions. And we're going to reverse engineer from an infinite and intentionally unattainable purpose all the way down to the actions you need to take hour to hour. First, let's pinpoint your purpose.

Now earlier, I told you how at the age of 13, I experienced a head injury that had profound effects on my mental state. And how stumbling across that book on goal setting gave my life direction. Just before I stumbled upon the book, I was at the peak of my psychic entropy as a teen.

Lost, confused, identity-less. Reading books about life's purpose. And this led me to believe that purpose was a static entity, something that you discover through introspection.

But this approach left me plagued with endless uncertainty. Then, having struggled with my health so much, I decided I wanted to help others with theirs, so I chose to pursue becoming a doctor. In doing this, my understanding of purpose began to shift. I realized that purpose isn't necessarily something that finds you.

Rather, it's something that you simply choose and then iterate upon as you engage with life. In other words, I realized that purpose is static. More a verb than a noun.

It's something you do, not something that you have. I didn't need to find it in a treasure chest lying deep in my psyche. It's subject to constant revision and may change with the seasons of life. It's not something to overly identify with or even get overly anchored to. It's a functional tool.

So instead of finding my purpose, I realized that I could just pick a problem. I asked myself, what's something messed up about the world? that I wish wasn't so messed up that I resonate with personally and the idea that anyone out there could struggle with their health like me bothered me and this changed everything. It instantly lowered the stakes around finding some lofty purpose and gave my life direction becoming a doctor.

As I said before even though I didn't end up becoming a doctor in the end it gave my life meaning purpose and direction and creative movement and momentum. This approach actually reminded me of rugby. How the hell do you know what position you're best at on the rugby field? without getting on the field. You've got to get into play.

There's no way to know, but once you're in play, your role will self-correct and clarify itself fast. The assumption that conviction, certainty, and confidence in your goals or direction are prerequisites to determining a direction is a misconception that seriously hinders progress, limits potential, and wastes years of many people's lives. So here's the rule.

Pick a problem, not a purpose. Ask, if I could change one thing about the world, what would it be? Maybe it's something you see personally with your friends, family, or the world at large.

The key is to not overthink it. This also addresses the common problem of picking a niche for would-be entrepreneurs. For example, you're walking along a beautiful beach, but instead of pristine sand, you find it littered with plastic bottles that is washed ashore. The problem here is plastic pollution in the oceans.

Your potential purpose is to create a world where oceans and marine life thrive free from the negative impact of human activities. Or you see a news report about a community where children have to walk miles every day just to collect water from a polluted river, risking their health and missing out on school. The problem? Access to clean water.

Your potential purpose? To build a world where basic human rights are respected and upheld for all. Or maybe your friend has been struggling with depression, but they're afraid to seek help because they don't want to be seen as weak or crazy by others.

The problem here may be mental health stigma. Your potential purpose is to ensure that every person on earth has the resources they need to live a healthy and dignified life. Or you might already be working on a problem you've picked. Maybe you're an athlete and you want to advance the frontier of human performance. Maybe you work for Google and the problem you're picking is to pursue their mission of organizing the world's information.

The key here is to realize that clarity about your direction in life is a choice. It's similar to ordering food off a dinner menu. Maybe you come to the restaurant and you already know what you want, but the chances are, if you're like most people, you don't. You get there, you look at the menu, you order something, and then you eat. Believe it or not, it's kind of similar with choosing a direction or a purpose in life.

Some people come to life knowing what they want to eat on the menu, or they figure it out really early on, but most have to look at the menu and just pick, unsure how it's actually going to taste. Just pick so you don't become starved with purpose. And over time, the problem you pick can evolve into a purpose. All right, so you've picked a problem to give your life purposeful direction at a high, broad level.

Now let's turn your purpose into a plan through reverse engineering. The next step is to set what's called a high-hard goal. To illustrate how to set high-hard goals, consider the strange case of the man who ate an airplane.

The first time he swallowed glass, he was nine years old. Thus began Michel Latito's fondness for eating dangerous objects. In 1959, gastroenterologists examined him. His condition? Pica, a taste for unusual non-nutritive items.

This launched an incredible career. Monsieur Majdeau, Mr. Eat-It-All, which was his nickname, was known to eat two pounds of metal every day. How?

Well, he would reduce metal objects into smaller pieces and keep his throat lubricated with mineral oil. Throughout his career, his diet included 18 bicycles, 7 TV sets, 2 beds, 15 supermarket trolleys. One must wonder what was going through his mind as he munched through the 14th trolley, by the way.

A computer, a coffin, including the handles. Skis and six chandeliers. But the pinnacle, in 1978, he ate an entire Cessna 150 aeroplane.

More precisely, he began eating it in 1978. It was a piece-by-piece process that took two years. In 1980, he emerged victorious from the battle of man versus flying machine. Now, how the hell did he do this? How did Michel manage to pull this off? Well, he used the same process we're going to use for architecting your gold stack.

Reverse engineering. Reverse engineering turns large goals into small achievable steps. It clarifies the tiny tasks involved in achieving a titanic goal and sets a timeline to get them done.

But first, what is your high-hard goal? What's your equivalent of Michel's airplane? Well, in the 1960s, Dr. Edwin Locke conducted groundbreaking research on goal setting and motivation. He found that setting specific challenging goals led to higher performance than setting easy, vague, or no goals at all. Locke's research laid the foundation for understanding the psychological mechanisms behind motivation and performance.

Then the term high-hard goals, coined by sports psychologist Dr. Stanley Beecham in California, encapsulates the type of goals that Locke found most effective and that can facilitate flow experiences. High hard goals are both challenging and require significant effort, pushing individuals to the edge of their abilities and demanding full concentration and engagement. A high hard goal is an ambitious long-term objective that takes one to five years to achieve.

High hard goals force you to grow and develop new skills. When you pursue high hard goals, you create the conditions necessary for entering flow state and achieving optimal performance. And Michelle...

Mr. Edol's story eating the airplane was the high-hard goal. Michel deconstructed the parts of the plane with its subcomponents. Then he started with the most manageable part, ground it down, and then took his first spoonful of lead.

You want to do the same with your goals, from airplane to spoonful of dust. Now let's ground it with another example. Suppose you want to start a billion-dollar climate tech company.

Your high-hard goal could be build a climate tech company that reaches a valuation of a billion within five years. To achieve this high-hard goal, You need to reverse engineer it and break it down to smaller annual goals. The high-hard goal is your airplane, but we need to work backwards from the outcome and grind it down to a spoonful of dust in order to eat it.

Using this example, here are some example annual goals. Year one is to validate problem and solution, to develop prototypes and secure initial funding. In year two, maybe you want to build a team, refine the product, establish partnerships. In year three... You decide you're going to scale the business and secure significant funding.

Now you can see that each year builds upon the previous one. The next step is to take the year one annual goal and break it down into quarterly goals. Here are examples of what your quarterly goals for the year one may be. Maybe you decide that in quarter one you're going to conduct market research, identify target market, and then define the problem to be solved.

And in quarter two, based on the defined problem, you're going to develop a prototype solution and gather user feedback. Maybe in quarter three... You're going to refine the prototype based on user feedback and each quarter builds upon the achievements of the previous one, creating a logical progression towards the ultimate goal.

Now continuing with our reverse engineering, let's create monthly goals that directly support the Q1 goal. Month one, maybe you identify target market and conduct 40 customer interviews to gather insights about their needs and pain points. In month two, maybe you analyze interview data to identify common themes and define a clear problem statement.

And maybe month three, you ideate. potential solutions to the defined problem and craft a unique value proposition that sets your solution apart. Now next, let's plan weekly goals that directly lead to achieving the month one goals. Week one, maybe you decide you're going to create a customer interview script and identify 50 potential interviewees who fit the target market criteria.

Week two, you're going to conduct the first 10 customer interviews using the script you get the idea for week three and for week four by ensuring that each level of the goal stack directly supports and leads to the next. Completing each goal sets the stage for the next, much like dominoes falling in a precisely planned sequence. Now bear in mind, as you do this, you don't want to get too caught up in perfecting every detail up front.

Your reverse engineering doesn't need to be flawless. Things will become clearer as you move forward. Think of it less like waterfall project development, where you plan out everything in detail before even starting, and then follow that plan exactly despite learning new things, and much more like the lean startup approach. You set a direction. But you hold the plans lightly, refining as you go.

The act of moving ahead will illuminate the right path. The skill is to approximate as close as possible to what the next step may be and as far as possible out in the chain. Of course it's not going to be perfect, you can't read the future, but you want to map it out in a lot more detail than most do regardless. So don't put too much pressure on yourself. Sketch out your best estimation of the reverse engineered sub-goals needed to reach your high hard goals.

With that in mind, at this point you should have built out a goal stack comprised of a series of steps that lead to your high hard goal. With the goal stack, you've anchored yourself to a goal to structure your consciousness, the first step in becoming goal directed. But now, how do we convert this goal stack into daily, hourly, and minute by minute actions that actually lead us up the staircase and attain that critical minute to decade alignment?

Well, this brings us to the absolute core driver of peak performance and productivity, which is to commit to your goal. The goal-directed actions. Now that you've built your goal stack, you've given some longer-term structure to your consciousness. You still have to deal with what to do at any given moment, what's right in front of you.

You still have to deal with the demands of the day and the dozens of decisions that come along with that. How do you ensure that the actions you take and what you work on will actually lead to you reaching your goals? Well, think of your productivity as a car. Elite performers spend nearly all their time driving directly to their destination, taking the best route possible.

On the other hand, most people... spend a tiny percentage of their time actually driving directly to the destination. 90% of it is spent driving in circles down cul-de-sacs, turning down the wrong roads, or crashing into trees and having to reverse. To illustrate this, I remember during my early years in business. I was at a business mastermind that powder mounted in Utah.

I was observing two different entrepreneurs who had the same goal of building their business to eight figures in the same industry. And I'll keep their names private, but here's a snapshot of how they spent their day. Entrepreneur A wakes up and spends 15 minutes wondering what the most important thing might be to work on, then takes a break from wondering about it and answers all her email.

That has a hunch that it might be good to improve her branding because one of the emails she just responded to mentioned the branding. in her company has some room for improvement. So she spends 90 minutes on that.

Then she gets a call from her team and oversees what they're doing. Then decides it could be good to explore expanding their social media presence. So she spends a few hours researching vendors, calling a few of them up. But then she decides not to continue with that.

She's floating through her day like a leaf in the wind without clear direction or orientation around goal-directed actions. While entrepreneur B knows that from the day before, the single goal for the business right now for this quarter is to increase lead generation. She also knows that for this month, the single most important way to do that is to focus on the most effective marketing channel, which is Facebook ad. She also knows that the most important way to improve Facebook ads is by rewriting all the ad creative.

So she sits down for three hours, drops into flow, and rewrites every ad, sends them out to her team members to implement, and then ties up the rest of the loose ends and finishes her day. The night before, she had determined everything. And before checking anything, she attacks that one thing that she knows isn't it.

thing that will drive her toward that goal of getting her business to eight figures. So think of your goal stack as a towering stack of dominoes. To topple a whole structure, you need to identify the one key domino that will trigger the best cascading chain reaction. Unlike everyday tasks that keep you busy but not truly progressing, these are the tasks that directly propel you toward where you want to go. With maximum speed, these domino toppling tasks are called goal-directed actions.

A goal-directed action is simply The action that will progress you more toward a given goal than any other possible action conceivable. It's an action that, when completed, directly brings you one step closer to your high-hard goal, or whatever goal it is that you're pursuing. It's the domino that knocks down the next domino in line most effectively. Tasks that aren't goal-directed action are the equivalent of being hamster on a wheel.

There's a lot of activity and movement, but ultimately the hamster isn't going anywhere. Performing goal-directed actions while in a flow state is the cornerstone of peak performance. Now as you're learning about goal setting I want to quickly tell you about a goal we have for the channel which is to get to a million subscribers by the end of the year. We're growing rapidly and we think we're going to be able to do it but only with your help and if you're able to help us pull that off we will release a free chapter of our upcoming book on flow at the end of the year when we hit the million subscribers. Thanks so much for your support, much love and go ahead hit subscribe so we can continue leveling up your ability to access flow state with more consistency and reliability.

Once in flow, within a goal-directed action, our productivity and creativity increases. So we are both working on the best possible thing we can work on to lead us directly to the goals in our goal stack, while also in the most effective state of consciousness possible in doing the work. Goal-directed actions also ramp up what's called perceived importance.

Perceived importance is the personal significance we assign to an activity. This alters our neurochemistry, increasing dopamine, which heightens your motivation. commitment and concentration, leading to greater attention paid to the task when you perceive it as more important, which in turn leads to faster entry into flow state.

So the more goal-directed your actions are, the greater the dopamine release, the more flow you will get, and the easier it will become to get into a flow state in the first place. And this is much of the reason why we focused on developing a minimum viable purpose by picking a problem within the goal step. Purpose increases the perceived importance of the task, the meaningfulness of the given goal-directed practice. our attention and drives us into a flow state.

At this point, you've grasped the significant impact that goal-directed actions have on entering flow state and boosting your productivity. So how do you know what your goal-directed actions are? Well, that brings us to the last step in becoming goal-directed, which is to separate planning from doing.

Most professionals approach their work like shotgunners against a herd of zombies in a video game. They fray and spray and fray, having to react to every zombie as a matter of life or death. When you become goal-directed, you become more like a sniper. You're high up in the sniper's net, able to survey the whole landscape on your time. With no hurry, you can take a deep breath, hone in, and then bam, knock out the target with maximum efficiency.

To move from reacting to deciding, we need to separate planning from doing, each of which require different modes of cognition. Divergent thinking is creative, where we link disparate... far-flung ideas to form something new.

On virgin thinking, it's when our attention narrows in on a single thing. Both states are critical, but they don't blend well. altogether.

We want to use one or the other. Diverge when planning, converge when doing. Separating these two brain states through separating planning from doing frees us to act without questioning whether or not what we're about to do is the best thing we could do.

Now according to Dr. Kahneman's dual process theory, our cognition involves two distinct systems. The fast, intuitive system one for doing and the slow analytical system too for planning. Separating planning and doing allows each system to function optimally without interference. And John Sweller's cognitive load theory posits that our working memory has limited capacity, and trying to plan and act simultaneously increases cognitive load, the amount of information we're trying to hold in our minds at any given time, which dramatically impairs performance and blocks flow.

Conversely, decreasing cognitive load increases our ability to slide into a flow state. So separating planning from doing is critical. Because it also eliminates reactivity.

The more strategic you are, the less often reactionary tasks will occur. You then get to treat each goal-directed action as an event. This clarity reduces overwhelm and prevents you from working excessive hours. And it improves your quality of life immensely. You don't need to do as many things when you find goal-directed actions that maximally advance you towards your goals.

All the wasted effort that is non-goal-directed can start to drop away. Now as things get overwhelming and busy, we want to invest even more in planning. To do this, at the end of each workday, take 10 minutes to plan tomorrow's goal-directed actions. This will ensure you are always working on the most goal-directed actions while in flow state, which amplifies your productivity while working on those goal-directed actions. Think of it kind of like a power-down ritual.

There's a few steps to it. The first is to avoid goal drift. This step involves revisiting your goal stack.

Review your long-term goals at the end of each day. The purpose is to check your daily activities against your high hard goals. to ensure alignment. It helps in identifying goal drift deviations from your long-term objectives so you can course correct.

This review acts as a compass keeping you truly focused on what matters most. All you do here is pull up your goal stack and make sure that you're on course hitting your goals based on all of the reverse engineering you've already done. The next step in the power down ritual is to line up the dominoes. This is where you find and line up the dominoes such that you can flick one and it'll knock down the next and the next most effectively. Identify the three Maximum three most critical goal-directed actions for the following day.

These should be tasks that have the greatest movement toward your long-term goals that you can possibly conceive of. These tasks should ideally be challenging yet achievable, aligning with your skills. To do this, take the weekly goals you've identified as part of your goal stack and break them down as a daily goal-directed actions.

What we'll do here is focus on one to three critical tasks, no more than three. Each day, they'll move you closer to your weekly target. Building an arc. example of a climate tech company here are the example daily goal directed actions for week one of the goal stack monday it might be to draft customer interview scripts create a list of 50 potential interviewees tuesday it might be to revise and finalize our interview script based on team feedback and prioritize our top 20 interviewees and find contact info and so forth for wednesday and onward now daily goal directed actions turn your high hard goals into bite-sized achievable tasks the next part is to set clear goals. Each goal-directed action. Clear goals are a quintessential flow trigger.

Unlike bigger goals, like those you set on a daily and weekly level and beyond, a clear goal is an action to take, like kicking a soccer ball into the net, not broad outcomes like winning the soccer match. Now the trouble most people have when trying to set clear goals is they don't set them anywhere near clearly enough. The key is to set wildly specific clear goals for each of your big goal-directed actions.

That way... The brain doesn't have to expend resources on wondering how, why, or what to do. To achieve this, you want to break the task down into micro goals, even if the task will only take an hour.

This way, you get a steady drip of dopamine. For example, maybe the first step is to write the intro to the presentation. The second clear goal is to add the data from past client results into the presentation. Third clear goal is to design the graphics with our brand colors.

This doesn't need to take long. You can write these clear goals down within 60 seconds. Then take the first step to the first step.

Building on the presentation example, the first step to the first step is opening up a word processor, titling the document, and saving it in the right folder. Part of your power down ritual, when you map out your goal-directed actions with these wildly clear, minuscule clear goals within the task, and take the first step of the first step, you can dive right into work the next day and get it to flow. Think of it like having a personal trainer in the gym.

All you need to do is lift the weight, they move you to each machine, load up the weights, and all you need to do is push. Compare this to wandering around the gym. trying to configure different machines, wondering how many sets you should do of each thing, how much weight you should add, whether you did too many bicep curls or not enough legs. on and on and on. Clear goals are what help you turn goal-directed actions into something similar.

The final step of this power down ritual is to clear out any undone tasks and tie down all loose ends so you have a free and clear runway for working on goal-directed actions the next day. The average knowledge worker never does anything close to this power down ritual. At best, they'll make a somewhat arbitrary bullet list on a Monday often determined by a superior or whatever mood they happen to be in in the moment.

It's not at all anchored to their long-term vision. It's not reverse engineered. and it's not scheduled into the calendar so that it actually gets done.

On the other hand, the most elite performers on Earth are the most goal-directed. That's just how it is. There's a conscientiousness about how each moment is being spent and the degree to which it actually has to be thought out as to whether it will move the maximally forward or not, and a level of violent attack on those goal-directed actions that leads to extreme accomplishment.

The degree to which you are effective at identifying goal-directed actions is the degree to which you will minimize wasted effort and maximize goal attainment with minimal sacrifice. The aim is to make sure that every hour of the day is disproportionately allocated toward goal-directed actions. Building your goal stack gives structure to your consciousness.

Goal-directed actions ensure that what you are working on now will lead you up the goal stack to where you want to be in the far future. And clear goals give us a target for our attention and drive us into flow. Living your goal stack is the way you maximize minute-to-decade alignment.

which structures your consciousness and gives your moment-to-moment consciousness harmony by anchoring it within the context of a goal even if that north star is decades away from the present moment it harmonizes your consciousness to tie all of this together here's a model for becoming goal directed by leveraging the three key pillars of being goal directed your goal stock goal directed action and clear goals for flow the goal directed pyramid aligns aspiration with action and attention picture this You're standing at the base of a massively inspiring pyramid. The pyramid is your guide to achieving your most ambitious aspirations and living a truly fulfilling life. First off, you've got the base of the pyramid, which is your goal stack, the aspiration. The base of the pyramid is your purpose, a meaningful problem to solve that fuels your ambition.

Above this foundation is a staircase of progressively smaller blocks, your high-hard goals, broken down into annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly targets. This is your goal stack, with each level supporting the one above it. linking daily actions to long-term aspiration. Then you've got the core, your goal-directed action. At the pyramid's heart, a glowing path of stepping stones ascend to the apex.

Each stone is a goal-directed action, a high-impact task that propels you forward and creates a domino effect of progress. The stones shine brightly, contrasting the dimmed surroundings, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing goal-directed actions over less critical activities. And then you've got the summit, your clear goals, attention at the pinnacle. A focused light beam illuminates the path representing your clear goals, the specific actionable sub-steps for each goal-directed action. This light shows the immediate next action to take, providing exact directions to initiate flow.

It symbolizes how clear goals command focus, eliminate ambiguity, minimize distractions, and enable deep concentration. End each day with a power down ritual. Review your goal stack, plan tomorrow's goal-directed actions, and set clear goals.

Start each day with your most important goal-directed actions. Clear. Letting clear goals guide you into a flow state.

Regularly review and realign actions with aspirations or correcting as you move forward. Because getting into the deep now through flow requires clarification of the far future. And to build the far future, you need time in the deep now, deep in a flow state, producing your greatest work. The deeper the flow state you experience now and the more what you work on in that flow state ties to shaping the far future, the more goal-directed you are. It imbues your actions with meaning and responsibilities, the antidote to apathy, the cure from boredom and anxiety, and revitalizes a directionless life into one of clarity and fulfillment.

Now if you want to take this deeper, there's a way to power up your long-term goals with intrinsic motivators. That way, no matter what kind of external progress you're making towards your goals, you still have unwavering consistency and motivation to keep climbing. Click the video on screen to find out how.

Transcript for:Achieving Flow and Overcoming Mental Chaos

Transcript for:
Achieving Flow and Overcoming Mental Chaos