Steven Kotler’s journey towards understanding effective learning strategies took an unexpected turn during a period of profound illness. Struggling with his health challenges led him to delve into the concept of flow states, ultimately unraveling its transformative power. Through his personal ordeal and subsequent exploration, Steven not only gained insights into peak performance but also unearthed a universal truth about the human capacity for growth and resilience. His story serves as a compelling reminder of the untapped potential within each of us and the remarkable impact of effective learning strategies on our lives.
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The internal experience of learning for everyone, everybody in the world. Is I suck. I suck, I suck, suck, I suck. Oh look, I don't suck anymore.
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. We hope you'll enjoy this episode from the archive. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Stephen Kotler, a New York Times bestselling author, award winning journalist, and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. Stephen is one of the world's leading experts on human performance. He's the author of thirteen books, nine of them best sellers, including the Art of Impossible, A Peak Performance Primer.
Hi Steven, welcome to the show.
Good to be with you, Eric.
Your book is called The Art of Impossible, A Peak Performance Primer. And as I was telling you before the show, I have taken perhaps as many notes on this book as any I have read. So we've got a lot of different ways we could take this conversation. But before we get into it, we'll start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson in life, and he says, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
I don't know what it means to you in my life for my work, but I can tell you what it reminds me of, which is one of the really sort of strange and interesting things about human biology and human performance is the system. Meaning our biology is designed in a very weird way at every level to go where you look, where you put your attention is where you end up. And this is very very clear in action sports, where I've done a lot of research, where if you want to, for example, surf a tube, everything that has to take place in that tube takes place basically too fast for you to react. All you can really do is put your eyes on the end of the tube and you go there. When you want to ski, you're really hard straight behind, you get to the point where you put your eyes on the exit and you go there. We're goal directed machines on the internally, and what that essentially means is we don't live in reality. We live in a world that's shaped predominantly by our fears and our goals, and in a sense, on an internal level, with those goals, the way sort of consciousness of our biology is designed to work. Once again, you go where you look, you go where you put your attention, So I guess in a sense it depends on which one you feed. Is roughly the same as a neurobiological principle, which essentially, we go where we look, we go reput our attention.
So I'm going to start us in an unusual place. It's near the end of your book. Can you describe having lime disease and you describe going out and starting to surf, and you just starting to have these mystical experiences. I'm wondering if you could share a little bit more about that, and I'm kind of curious whether they've still continued for you. And then I went to ground some of that back into what the science tells us, because you've done a great job of taking these mystical experiences and bringing them back to some of why we think they might be occurring.
So, as you pointed out, when I was about thirty, I was very sick. I got lime disease, and I spent the better portion of three years in bed, and towards the end, I got dragged out to the Pacific Ocean and put on a surfboard. And this was at a time that I could barely walk across the room and I could focus, think clear headed and pain free and whatever, maybe ten twenty thirty minutes a day, and everything else was just fuzzy and painful. And I was out there maybe thirty seconds in a wave came and I literally probably took all the energy I had left in the world, and I spun my board around and I popped to my feet. I popped into a dimension of time I didn't even know existed. Time seemed to slow down. I had a slid out of body experience where I felt like I was hovering about my body and sort of watching myself, but like I had panoramic vision. The most amazing part was that I was clearheaded, and I felt great, and I hadn't felt even close vaguely normal for three years, so it was astounding. And I felt so good that day, and that experience was so wild that I ended up catching four more waves. And then when that was over, I was done, and I was exhausted, and my friends took me home, put me in the bed, and I didn't move again for about fourteen days. Fifteenth day walking in, I caught a ride with my neighbor and I went back to the beach and I did it again. And the amazing thing is Over the course of about six eight months, I wasn't went from about ten percent functional, meaning like I was functional about ten percent of time, to about eighty percent functional. And the only thing that I was doing different in my life was going surfing and having these quasi mistical experiences in the waves. So I was obviously very very curious about what the hell was going on, because surfing is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions, and I'm a rational materialist, I'm a science guy. I don't have mystical experiences, and lime is only fatal if it gets into your brain. So I was pretty sure that the re Even though I was feeling better, the reason I was having these quasi mystical experiences is because the disease had gotten in my brain. And so I lit out a giant quest to figure out what the heck was going on. And I very quickly discovered that these quasi mystic experiences I have names. We call them flow states, and once you start to understand the neurobiology of flow what's going on in the brain, a lot of these so called mystical experiences that show up with this state are obviously very explainable. Be a biology. But the second half of this question was am I still having these experiences today? Am I still getting into flow today? Yes, I'm still getting into flow today.
And so would you have described them as mystical then because you didn't know what else to call them and you weren't as experienced with being in flow?
Well, time slows down. I had an out of body experience. These are normally things that are classified as mystical experiences. Right. Time dilation. Now, what I didn't know at the time is time dilation, which is the time has e strangely speed upward, can slow down. That's actually a foundational property of flow. It's one of the six psychological characteristics that are used to describe this date. So some form of time dilation, usually time speeds up right, you sit down and write a quick email. GE's so sucked into what you're doing that an hour goes by, you look up and you're like, where did time go? That's what happens most of the time and flow. Occasionally, though, you get that freeze from effect that happened to me in the waves, or it's for you to enew's been in a car crash.
So let's swing now all the way back around to kind of the beginning of the book. The book is called The Art of Impossible, and you describe two levels of impossible. There's impossible, as in like somebody being able to run the four minute mile, which was once thought of as impossible. So that's one type, but you describe another type of impossible that might apply to more of the people listening than trying to break a record that's never been broken as an example.
Well, I think it all applies to everybody. Let me explain what I mean by that. I have spent my career studying those moments in time when the impossible becomes possible. I've done this in sports, I've done this in science and technology and business culture. That's what I call capital I impossible, doing that which has never been done. And what you just mentioned is lowercase I incompossible. There's small I impossible, which is essentially who I wrote the book for. Right lessons learned from those people who have accomplished capital impossible. It is for anybody who's going after lowercase I impossible, lowercase I impossibles those things we think are impossible for ourselves. I'll give you a simple example from the book. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio in the nineteen seventies. It was a blue collar steel mill town and I wanted to be a writer. I mean I wanted to be a writer from that was five or six years old. I didn't know any writers. I know how you became a writer. There was nowhere unn around to ask. There was no internet, there were no books to read. It was a lowercase I impossible, meaning there is no clear path from where I am to where I want to get to and statistically not great odds of success. What are other lowercase I impossibles that we all kind of are more familiar with getting paid for what you love to do, overcoming trauma, overcoming an addiction, becoming world class at anything to do, becoming a successful entrepreneur or artist. A missing one, obvious one that's eluding me that I like to.
Grab for, but I think it paints a good picture.
But I want to point out a couple of things just to frame this up so people understand something. When we talk about peakuman performance, we're talking about nothing more or less, I guess, than getting our biology to work for us, redman against us. That's all that peahuman performance is. And what this means is if your goal is capitaliz possible, that which has never been done, well, that's the biology you're going to draw. That's how you're going to do it. If your goal is small eye impossible, well the biology is the same, the tools are the same. In fact, if your goal is man, small eye impossible, caw fuck that. I'm just trying to get through Monday, right, Like, it doesn't matter. The biology is the same, the set of tools are the same because evolutions shaped human beings and the work that I do involve figuring out how to optimize that biology and its scales. Meaning it's the same in everyone or At the Flow Research Collective, we train on average about a thousand people a month, and we train everybody from kind of members in the US Special Forces and professional athletes and c suite executive CEOs of major companies all the way to like soccer moms from Ohio and insurance workers from Indiana and you know, software coders from Bangalore.
Right.
Because the work that I do is built on biology, principles apply to everybody and and we can use them.
In the book, you talk about biology scaling, but personality doesn't. And so the principles that we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about and as I mentioned from the number of notes I took, we're going to skim the very slightest surface of But the principles that we're about to cover, you're saying are happening at the level of biology, regardless of what our psychology might be.
Yes, personality, what your genetics are. Now, if you're not six ' ten, you know you're impossible is to be a center in the NBA in your four foot nine. Okay, this is not what we're.
Talking about, right, Like, you need a different book.
Yeah, you need a different book. I can't help you with the genetics part at all, Like that's a different thing. But barring that, yes, biology scales. My work is centered on the state of performance known as flow. Right, we talked about flow as what I was experiencing out in the waves. It is I alluded to is defined as an optimal state of consciousness. We refeel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, it's any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. You get so focused on what you're doing that everything else just disappears. Right time, dialights, as we talked about your sense of self disappears, actual awareness will start to merge, and all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. We could talk about how what through the roof actually means huge boosts in motivation, grit, productivity, creativity, learning, empathy, perspectives, a little bit of strength, stamina, fast, chuss, a couple other things. We talk about where the why later, But the point I want to make is those are basically all the things you want to accelerate for cognitive It's the whole suite, it's all our tools, they're all amplified and flow. And here's the kicker. Everybody's hardwired for floor flow. It's a foundational part of being human. Evolution shaped every human being to perform at their best in float. Flow is how we do. How we're hardwired for pre performance. There are other things going on during pre performance and other things that lead to it, but flow is at the center of it. And one of the most well established facts in flow science is that the state is universal, shows up in anyone anywhere provided certain initial conditions are that so everybody watching us, listening to this can get into flow and you can get this same boost and performance. So for starters, that's one thing that we're talking about. When you say biology.
Scales excellent, and you've written about flow elsewhere, it's been part of your writing for a while now, and so you say that this book expands upon that. Right, It certainly talks about we need flow, but we also have to train up some of the other skills like motivation, learning, and creativity. So a lot of the book is really talking about how we increase our motivation, how we increase our learning, and how we increase our creativity. So talk about how flow ties together with those three things.
So, as I said, peak performance is getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. What is that biology? What are the sets of skills being amplified? Motivation, learning, creativity, and flow. That is what we mean by cognitive peak performance. The way to think about this is, in any situation, any challenge, motivation is what gets you into the game. Learning is what allows you to continue to play, especially if you're going after like high hard goals that are complicated you don't quite not get there. Creativity is how you steer right, Creative problem solvings how you steer, and flow is how you sort of turbo boost, all those things sort of beyond reason with expectations. But you asked a sort of different question, which is sort of where I got stuck thinking about, like which way to frame this? How they relate is interesting. So, as you pointed out, I've been doing this a long time. I've been training people in flow for years and years and years. I think I've probably spoken to or trained order million people. Is I guess my staff has come up with. I don't know if it's right or not, but somewhere around there it's a lot of people. And what we've learned about flow over the past ten to fifteen years is more about the neurobiology of flow, what's going on in the brain and the body when we're in this state. And psychology is useful, but it's often metaphor. Neurobiology is mechanism. So if you want to make something reliable and repeatable, you want mechanism. So that is what has happened. We've gotten very good at training flow. And when I say very good, I say that at the Flow Research Collective we train about one thousand people a month. We measure flow with the standard psychological instrument pre and POST, and we see about a seventy percent boost in flow consistently back end of our trainings. But butt and button is how everything is related. What we used to see is you get this big burst and flow because it turns out this is easy to train, and then there'd be this spectacular return to baseline, like they'd get a ton of flow, and then it would just like it's somebody turned off the flow tap and flow is one of the most pleasurable, addictive, meaningful, life affirming experiences we can possibly have. And you give people a whole lot more of that and then you take it away or it stops showing up. You have very pissed off people, and we had very pissed off people, and so it's been a really long time trying to figure out what the hell's going wrong, what is And what we realized is problem wasn't flow. It was that all the stuff that flow amplifies, but specifically motivation, learning and creativity, if you hadn't trained those things up at alongside flow, you couldn't keep pace with the acceleration that the state provided. And worse, when psychologists and researchers talking about motivation, the term is technically defined as the energy for action. But what they really mean as a whole bunch of stuff. Motivation is that catch all term for external motivation or extrinsic motivation, So like money, sex, fame, things in the world that we want intrinsic motivation, internal motivators like curiosity or passion or purpose. We're also talking about goal setting and grit and if you haven't done really good grit work flows, this enormously pleasurable experience, but it doesn't last forever. And if you haven't done the good selling gritwork, there are going to be days where there's no flow, right, and it's just hard work, hardslogging, And if you haven't done the work to develop really good grit skills, those days are going to be very, very difficult. They get a little easier because of flow, and we know that flow massively amplifies grit. But some people have this problem when they do this flow work, where they start to feel that it's a bliss junkie problem. Flow is so addictively pleasurable, right, They're like, oh, dude, everything's got to feel this good. This is how life's supposed to feel. Well, No, no, it's not. And there's times when you can't get into flow, or you haven't done the really hardcore grit work, you can't sustain in the flow. It's not simple, but important.
I think, yep, absolutely, that really covered it. And I think you make that point a bunch of times, and I think it's an important one that on our way to impossible, flow is an absolute booster, necessary but not sufficient, yep. And that it feels really good. But along the way to impossible there's going to be a lot of feeling not very good also. And if all we're thinking about is oh, like you said, I should be feeling flow, I should be feeling good. This should always be wonderful, we won't have what it takes to keep going all the way too impossible, because there are times it's not easy.
The way I put it in the book, I think more meaningful does not always mean more pleasant, and that is very very true. In fact, interestingly, when positive psychologists talk about happiness these days, there's three levels of happiness available on the planet. The first level is happiness. How do you feel right here, right now? There's not a whole lot you can do about that level, right you can make yourselves. Dee Anne Harris said ten percent happier. Gratitude practice is mindfulness, practice is regular acts. There's stuff you can do, but because of how emotional set points work, those points are set up usually a BYuT ten eleven years old. And this is the worst we're going to feel and is the best we're going to feel in our lives going to take place pretty much in the middle, and barring chronic unemployment or the death of a child. On the low end, that's the low end, it doesn't move. It's pretty set. High end can move with constant exposures that flow, but as general, it doesn't. In other words, you can get ten percent happy, that's about it. And flow is no guarantee that you're going to be happier because flow takes place when we're pushing on our skills to the utmost. So usually when we're doing that, we're uncomfortable. And if you're really a peak performer, you're going to be uncomfortable all the time, right because you're always sort of trying to push on your skills and be a little better, and be a little better. You get very good at being uncomfortable, comfortable being uncomfortable, But moment to moment happiness probably doesn't move much the next two levels of happiness available to even being. The second level is a high flow lifestyle, right. It's lifestyle in which you get regular access to flow. This could be it doesn't matter what you do. Maybe what you do doesn't produce a lot of flow. I live in how and all around me there's tons of people who work whatever job they can get in the summer so they can ski all winter. That's a high flow lifestyle, right. The best we get to feel the planet is a high flow lifestyle where the thing that is giving us the most flow is coupled to our purpose. And you know, as a guy who my wife and I ran an animal sanctuary, I'm kind of in a very very very poor rural county for a very very long time with a lot of animal cruelty. That's a very high flow lifestyle with a lot of purpose. It was also pretty miserable, grueling, difficult work. It produced a lot of flow along the way and a lot of meaning. My point is that that kind of work produces deep meaning, deep contentment, deep purpose, deep peace. Even but happiness, I mean, it's just a thin drug. Ultimately, That's I think what you start to discover overview it's not that you don't want to be happy, it's that it's a thin drug, and there are much better drugs out there.
Right right, and often aiming right at happiness as that being the goal is particularly counterproductive.
Oh yeah, it's a good way to miss it. Yeah, it's a good way to miss it.
So what I'm going to do from here is we're just going to skip through a few different parts of the book and hit some different things that bring together some of these different components of motivation, learning, and curiosity. So I want to talk about motivation for a minute, because you talk about there being a stack that's really important in the drug live. Part of motivation, which we would think of is the way most people typically think of motivation as I feel like doing something right, I have the energy to want to do something. And you mentioned that there are really five things that make up this drive stack. You talk about curiosity, passion, purpose, and then autonomy and mastery. After those, I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about curiosity, because the way that you laid out for people to find some of their curiosity I really loved. I really liked some of the exercises that were there and so I was wondering if you could walk us through briefly the basic exercise and how somebody can start to find maybe what their curiosity is. I hear this up from a lot of people. I don't quite know what it is. How you cultivate a passion by sort of going through the gate of curiosity, I guess would be the better way to say it.
So, as you pointed out, there are a bunch of intrinsic motivators. There are way more than the five you met and curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, master but those tend in the science to be the biggest five. Right. You could listen intrinsic motivators forever, but those are the biggest five. And what the research shows is that if you want more motivation in your life, you actually start with extrinsic motivators. You've got to start like with you need enough money in a sense to take care of basic safety and security needs. You have to deal with safety and security first. Now it's a little bit. What the research shows is you basically have to be able to pay all your bills and have a little left over for discretionary spending. A little. It's not a whole lot. Once that's in place, if you want more motivation, more productivity, more energy for action. Turns out it's not that we stop wanting things like money, sex and fame. We still want them, but as a driver of performance and productivity, they're not as powerful as internal motivators are intrinsic drivers, and there's five of them, as you pointed out, Curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and master These are the big five. And what you notice among peak performers everywhere is much in the way that you like anybody. An athlete will like stack fuel sources, meaning they're always going to hydrate super well. They're going to make sure they have enough protein and carbs and fats and blah blah blah right and the right nutrition and the right supplements and the right everything. You also want to stack internal fuel sources. It's hard to do anything in this world, and it's hard to go after anything high hard goals. You need as many of internal fuel sources as you possibly can get. In other words, you want all your intrinsic motivators, your big five, aligned in point in the same direction, and they're actually built that way. They're built to come online in a certain order and to point us in direction. And as you pointed out, the most foundational human motivators curiosity. So, by the way, what's the big deal about intrinsic motivators? Like, why do we even care? Why are we having this conversation? Interest motivators give us focus for free. That's the really big deal. Your brain takes about twenty five percent of your energy at rest, and it gets two percent of your body weight. It's a giant energy hog, right, and focus is a huge, huge, huge caloric energy expense. You're curious about it. You're paying attention without working too hard or at all. That's great. Now, Curiosity, as you alluded to, is designed biologically to be built into passion. When people say passion, what that looks like biologically is often just the intersection of multiple curiosities. The way to think about this is like, maybe you're interested in football and you're interested in nutrition. Now, each of those on their own, they may not have enough energy kind of be a lifelong passion, something you're going to spend your whole life, you know, totally paying attention to all the time. But if you can figure out where three or four year curiosities intersect and get a couple of easy wins there, and get some other things going on that I talk about in The Art Impossible. That's sort of the ingredient for passion. Now, if anybody wants to know how to do this, yes, you can read The Art Impossible, but I can make it easier on you. You can go to www. Thepassion recipe dot com, which is we basically took these chapters because this was so important to so many people, and we turn it into an interactive workbook. It's free. We just put it online for people the Passion recipe dot com. It teaches you how to cultivate and turn curiosity into passion and turn passion into purpose. So if you want to cultivate curiosity, you really just want to start with twenty five things you're interested in it. And all I mean by interested it is, say you're a free weekend. You would maybe want to spend it watching a couple movies about the subject, or reading a book, or having a conversation or two with an expert. Right, that's what I mean interested. Make a list of twenty five things you're interested in. The key here is try to be as specific as possible, right, don't be interested in football. Be interested in the past blocking mechanics required to play left tackle as precise as you possibly can be. Right.
I loved your punk rock analogy. You got to give the if you remember. Oh yeah, don't be interested in punk rock, right.
Don't be interested in punk rock. Be interested. I think it was the evolution of political punk from Crass to Rise Against And had an old girlfriend who lived in the original Crass commune. And I don't know, I'm just a huge rise against man. I guess, but which is true?
Do you love Against Me?
I do love Against Me? They got a little more melodic. I really like early Against Me. It's a little too poppy for me, Like it's not quite as punk as they were, And I like the older punk better. But I really do like Against Me a lot. They've got a handful of my absolute favorite punk songs ever. Miami Baby, I'm an Anarchist.
Yeah, they're live record that they put out.
Oh I love it.
I don't know if you've it.
It's so good. The live version of the lyric is condoliez.
Yeah, what the hell?
From her Lips to God's Ears. I think that's the name of the song From Her Lips to God's Ears. The live version of that is really good, and Potatoes, Rice and Beans live is really good on that album as well.
They're an amazing live band. So we've derailed ourselves.
Now back to punk is something got Now you got my attention.
Maybe we'll see if we lead back around to it. So we're making a list of twenty five things.
Twenty five things you're interested in, and then you just want to look for places they intersect. So you know, I said, let's say nutrition is also on your list. Again too vague, right, you're interested in the past blocking mechanics to play left tackle, and nutrition is too big. But maybe you're The example I give in the book is insects as a few food source, right, So where could they possibly intersect? Well, it requires a lot of calories to play left tackle, right, would insects make a good football food? That's an intersection? And all I say is when you find those intersections, play there for a while. Just play there, go there, hang out, spend ten minutes twenty minutes a day, do this over months and months and months. Test out those intersections. See which ones are really sticky and grabby for you. Or there's a lot of energy. But if you can figure out where three or four of your curiosities intersect and start playing there and learning stuff and getting some easy wins along the way, that's how we build passion. A couple things that are worth pointing out, though, because people have this problem when they start cultivating passion, is they think about passion. I say, you know, give me an example of athletic passion. You get like Lebron James coming in for the and dunk, you know, with a skowl on his face and the finals. Right, And yes, you are right, that is passion. But that is a late stage passion. That is not what early stage passion looks like or feels like. Early stage passion is just a little kid standing in a driveway trying to get a basketball to drop. And it feels like that on the inside, right, It feels more like curiosity and little successes than like this burning, consuming thing that you think you expect to this like giant burning fire all at once. It's not going to be there. And the other thing is you don't want it there right away. What you want to do is slowly cultivate your passion and make sure you've got it right, because you don't want to be a couple of years into this is my passion to discover Oh shit, it was only a phase, right. I don't actually want to spend the next two years on an archaeological dig in the deserts of Egypt because no, it turns out it was a phase. Right, Like when you come to that point, if you screw it up, it's really demotivating. So on the front end, you want to go slowly here. This is not one of those things in peak performance. Everybody can do this. Everybody can figure out align their curiosities, build them into passion, build passion and a purpose. We're all biologically hardwired for it. We all can do it. But you want to do it slowly, and you don't want to be in a rush in this case, right. A lot of people are really impatient to be there already and get it, and here you really don't. The system, the biology is designed for this to be cultivated over time, and you don't want to make an error on this when this is one of those places where you've got to go slow to go fast.
Yeah, I love you saying the book. You know, we often think of, like you said, passion, get obsessed, stay obsessed, and you say, you know, let's start with get curious, stay curious. All right, I'm going to jump right out of that section, even though we could go from there into how to turn that passion into a purpose and you know, autonomy and mastery in that area. But I want to move into a little bit about grit, and I want to talk about the idea of learning to work with our thoughts as part of grit.
Oh, yeah, that's really key. So place to start, I guess is that when psychologists define grit, they often define it using Angela Duckworth's definition as the intersection of passion and perseverance. And I love Angela's work. She's an exceptionally bright woman. She's done exceptionally great research. But when you talk to pig performers about grit, they actually say, hey, wait a minute. They train six different kinds of grit skills, and it all sort of require different techniques and in the end they sort of all will boil down to the same thing, but you have to train them independently for a while. The first is the perseverance, the grit we're all familiar with, right, kick me in the teeth, punche me that God doesn't matter. I'm still coming. And that's the that's the first level of grit. As often and by the way, it's if you want to train that level of grit, that level of perseverance, you want to start physically. The research says, even if you want to train it cognitively, which is the question that you asked about, and we're going to get there, the place to start is physically and by perseverance. If you work out, you go to the gym and you normally do three sets of ten when you bench press, next time, do two sets of ten and one set of eleven, very very slowly. You just want to push outside your comfort zone a little bit at a time, over and over and over again. And here's the key, especially on perseverance side, because this is this is tricky and people miss this a lot. It's not enough to put in the hard work to get grittier. You have to notice. So you have to in other words, you got to Yes, you got to show up and do that next eleventh eleventh rep. You know, every time you work out, just for the next month, but you also got to remember at the end of the month to look back and go, wow, the entire time every time I had to do that eleventh breath, I got it. I'm tough enough to do that. You've got to remember to notice that you're developing grit along the way, which is really important because you have to trust that grit for it to really make a difference in your life. You need to be able to know that you go into the situation and you're actually grittier, right, Like you can handle a little bit more, which is why we want to do this for a long period time, and we won't to pay attention to it once you've sort of become a little physically grittier. The next thing to pay attention to if you're interested in pea performance, if you're interested in getting through tomorrow, I think, is the grit to control your thoughts. Right. You got to pay attention to what's going on up here, because you know, if you're anything like me, it's bad upstairs a lot of the time, right, And so if I'm not kind of paying attention to what's going on in my head, it can often swallow me. There's a number of different ways to sort of tune your thoughts and work with this particular problem, Gratitude less or mindfulness breath work meditation. These are two really really great methods. There's a lot of other stuff you can do. If you're more kind of kinesthetically oriented like me, you may prefer yoga to just straight up meditation because there's some movement involved. But there's a lot of different ways to sort of get some space between kind of thought and emotion. There's a gap between thought and emotion. What you want to try to do is like stretch it out so that when the thought pops up, before you get super angry and totally lose your temper at your wife or spouse or husband or whomever, you have a second to get in there and be like, whohoa, whoa right? Really sure this is the reaction you want?
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You bring up a couple of different things here. One is this idea of using the phrase control in our thoughts, which you then later sort of say, well, that's a little bit of a misnomer, right. Any of us who have sat down to meditate know the initial sort of launch of a thought into our brain is not really a controllable phenomenon. What comes up is what comes up. It's really what we do after that. And I love that you talk about the self talk. You say self talk's really important.
Here.
There's a quote in here from Michael Gervais that I absolutely love, and listeners who have heard me talk about this a lot. And he says that there's only two kinds of thoughts, those that constrict us or those that expand us. And I think that is such a powerful idea. You know, even when decision making, is this decision going to make me bigger or smaller? Is it going to expand me or contract me? That core idea is so powerful.
I think so too. Well. What I like about it is for me. When Mike first said it to me, I thought about, well, I know what thoughts that create more space feel like internally, right, and so that I was like, Oh, this is totally applicable because I know what this feels like, so I can steer from this right off the bat. Mike's very very good at that at coming up with performance tools where you're like, oh, I like, not only do I know what you mean, I know what it feels like.
That's why I love it too. Yeah.
Yeah, So I'll tell you something funny about this. This is not exactly in the art impossible. We were having this conversation on this phrase. So I was skiing week and a half ago one of the biggest lines I've ever skied of my life, and there's one hundred foot straight line at the end of it, which means you don't get to turn for one hundred feet. You just like you pin between two rock walls and you just have to hold keep it together until you get to the exit or you'll die. And it's terrifying. And I got into the straight line and my right ski hit a bunch of ice icicles actually that were fallen off the trees and into the run and it was like my race ski was bouncing on marbles. And the guy with schema said later it looked like I started to tip forward and like I was going to somersault, which would have put me in the hospital easy, possibly worse. And my internal experience, the way I described it to afterwards, this is like my brain found another gear, which I appropriately referred to as fuck this. I'm not dying now, right, but I like, I got incredibly angry in the moment, like in rage, and I get what he said is is just look like I sat back up and shot out of there, and I remember nothing at other than just being like, wow, this is that feeling that precedes the I'm falling now, which precedes the ongoing to the hospital now. And I was like, I'm not, like no, and I got super angry, and what was interesting. And this is why I'm bringing this up is we were talking about that experience in the context of Mike's quote, because you would not expec act like anger to be a thought that creates space. But in this particular case, this particular context, it was the only tool, right. If I wouldn't have grabbed for something that would have given me a lot of testosterone and adrenaline at that moment, I had to fight against gravity, right like icicles stripped me forward, which is really interesting. And we were talking about how sometimes thoughts that create space are not going to be the obvious ones sometimes. That was what the conversation was, and I thought, I thought it was an interesting, subtle point in one I hadn't thought about before.
Yeah, that's a great story. We're nearing the end of our time. But let's hopscotch ahead in the book here, and I want to talk about another part that I absolutely loved, which was the five Steps to Learn Anything.
Wait wait, wait, wait wait, you left out the most important part of that title, the five steps to learn anything.
Before you have a public opinion on it, five not so easy steps to learn anything, Yes, five not so easy steps. Yes, I better add that to my outline and you sort of talk about the Other part of it that I loved is you're like, before I'm going to have a public opinion about something, I'm going to have gone through those And I remember thinking, boy, that would be refreshing for the world for more people to think, Well, before I'm going to have an opinion on that, I'm going to go through these five steps. It was really practical, and it really sort of dovetailed in some ways with my experience of learning things. And there were some subtleties that I had not thought of before that I think will help me in the future. So let's just kind of go through them relatively quickly.
There's a lot of detail in there, But here's the big idea. What's worth knowing is learning works a certain way in the brain. We're designed to learn in a certain way, and if you can sort of do that and harness that, you can get a lot farther faster. So in the five not sweezy steps, basically a lesson in how to read and how to learn from This is about knowledge acquisition, not skills acquisitions. So this is about how do you learn a subject. It's going to involve reading and what I want to talk about now is what do you pay attention to? Will you read? Because it's from a neurobiological standpoint, it's not what you think it is, and it's much more interesting when you actually know how the brain work is designed to work. Makes it so much easier. So the things that I talk about paying attention to when you're reading, when you're trying to learn, because it's not what you did in high school or what you did in school, right, it's almost the exact opposite one. Your brain loves narrative. Your brain does cause and effect all the time. Right, this caused this? Why? Because we want to know that. We want to know how to create our future. Right, we want to know if this causes this, I know how to get that, I know how to intervene. I know how it works. That's what a narrative is. That's what a story is. This happened first, This happens, This happened third. Right, So when you're reading, one of the first things we want to pay attention to a little bit is history, the history of a subject. First of all, stop being intimidated by subjects. Just realize that any intellectual subject, whatever it is, it's just a voyage of discovery. Somebody had a question, they answered that question. It led to another question, and somebody had another question and they answered that one of them. Right, that's the voyage of discovery. That is any subject, and it's a narrative, And so just pay a little bit of attention to the order. The narrative is the big Christmas tree. If you give your brain the big Christmas tree, when the individual facts show up ornaments, you'll have an easier time remembering them because your brain is going to be like, oh, this happened. I put this fact right there. It slots in. This is something your brain naturally does, so you're just taking advantage of kind of your own basic software there. The second thing you want to pay attention to is terminology jargon. And what I mean by that is and I will be the first person to like, I have a flat rule in my company and by my life. If somebody needs a lot of big words to explain it, probably lying something I learned as a journalist. Right, For years and years and years, I've met the smartest people on the planet, and most of them can explain their thing to you as if you were five years old. It's always the folks who don't quite know what they're talking about that make it really fancy. In my opinion, that said jargon, while super annoying, tends to be annoyingly precise, and technical language often contains most of a subject. So when people talk about I need to learn a new subject, a large chunk of what they're actually saying is you need to learn vocabulary. So the way I do it is, when I'm reading one of these books, if I'm getting fancy language showed up that I don't understand. First time I see the word, I ignored. The second time I see the word I ignored. If I see a technical word that's three, three or four times in the book, I look it up, and then every time I see it from that point on, I just say the definitional out loud right instead of reading the word. I read the definition until it starts to stick. And the reason is just by learning those definitions, you start to learn huge, huge, massive amounts about the subject, and then you have the overarching history. But here's the most important thing, and this is the secret to learning. When you're writt in a book, pay attention to what I call your emotional wows. Those curiosity moments where you go, what the hell are that's so cool? And its ideas start firing. The reason is this curiosity is neurobiologically a little bit of dopeman and a little bit of aura up an effort. Those are the two neurochemicals that appear in the brain that help produce the sensation of curiosity. But they do something else. They prime learning. When they're in our brain, we have a much easier time remembering what we're learning. So write down this is what The only thing I really take notes on when I read are my emotional wows.
Oh.
On page seventy seven, here's this really cool idea about pattern recognition and the brain, and it reminds me of blah blah blah. I follow my curiosity that way, I remember it. I follow my brain through a subject as long as you follow your curiosity through a subject. Now, by the way, this is not how you master a subject to pass a test in college. This is not going to help you there. This is like actual, real, practical, real world applicable knowledge that you can do shit with passing a test. You have requirements for that test. This will help. But if you're reading Ethan Frome in college and they're going to ask you you may want to write down more than just the emotional wows. Okay, so caveat there. But this will really really help because by following our curiosity, we're following our natural learning software. That's how I do it. The other thing that I always point out to people because people make this mistake. I don't know if it's that we were taught this in school or we just assume this because it seems like common sense don't always need to understand everything. Learning means being uncertainly internal experience of learning for everyone everybody in the world is I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck. Oh look I don't suck anymore, right, that's the experience of it. In fact, my buddy Andrew Youubman is a Stanford neuroscientist, we do a lot of work with He says, you know, he does a lot of work with the Navy Seals, and he says, you know, one of the things that peak performers, especially a speck ops guys know that everybody else doesn't, is that peak performance it's always crawl, walk, run, And the biggest difference is between pea performers and everybody else is that. Peak performers know this, and everybody else show up and they're like, dude, man, I don't crawl, I don't even walk. I'm going to figure out what the shortcut is. I'm going to start by a jog, right, And peak performers show up and they're like, you know what, Okay, I got a crawl, then I'm gonna walk and then maybe I'll run it. And it's gonna suck. I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck, and there's nothing to do but to do it. And it's funny because you see these top performers and we often think, oh my god, there's so far ahead of the rest of us. How did they get there. One of the main ways they got there is every time they're faced with the challenge, they know it's going to suck, and they just don't care. They just lean right in the rest of us when face for the challenge, we dither around for a while. We're eventually going to rise to the challenge and do the thing. You've got to get it done, sooner or later, you got to. But most of us are like, oh, really, let me call my brother and tell them about all the shit. I got it. You know, we do all that, but peak performers just like, nope, crawl walk round. I'm just going to lean in immediately.
I loved that whole section, and I think what you just said there is a great place for us to wrap up the conversation, which is really that idea of crawl, walk run. I talk about it all the time on the show. We just talk about this idea of you know, sometimes we've got to be willing to take baby steps. We've got to start where we are and move through the progression.
I got to tell you something. I think it's all baby steps, but you've just got to be willing to continue to take baby steps. One of the things I tell people this isn't one hundred percent Drew, but as a general rule, because of emotional set points, if you've sort of survived being a teenager, you've already felt just about the worst that life can offer you. I'm not saying you can't have that bad feeling for days and days and weeks and months on ends, you know what I mean. But emotional set points are sort of set up by around you know, ten or eleven or twelve, by like bad experiences good experiences, and most of life takes place in between, and then you get teenagers where your hormones are raging and you have no control of your emotions. So honestly, again, as I said earlier, unless there's the death of a child, the chronic unemployment, which can change this as a general rule, if you've survived being a teenager, you've suffered the worst that you're going to suffer on any peak performance path, taking those baby steps, which is a strange thing to realize, but it seems to be biologically true.
Awesome, well, Stephen, thank you so much. I found the book absolutely fascinating. As I said, I took so many notes, my curiosity points of things that jumped off the page, because that's the way I prepare for these interviews what excites me. There were a ton of them.
Well, thank you, I appreciate that.
Thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show.
I appreciate it. Well, my pleasure. Thank you.
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