The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Life of Purpose: Steven Kotler | The Neuroscience of Flow

Join us for our Life of Purpose series this month as we revisit some of our most impactful episodes. Dive deep into expert insights and practical strategies on health, performance, and community, helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment.

Dive into the captivating world of flow and neuroscience with renowned author and peak performance expert Steven Kotler, in this thought-provoking episode of Unmistakable Creative.

In this mind-expanding conversation, Steven Kotler takes us on a fascinating journey through the science of flow - a state of optimal human performance where time seems to vanish and individuals feel their best and most creative. Drawing from his extensive research, Steven unveils the neurological processes that underpin this elusive state, shedding light on how we can tap into flow more consistently and unlock our full potential.

Join us as we explore the key elements that trigger flow and how it can be harnessed to enhance creativity, productivity, and overall well-being. Steven shares practical tips and strategies for achieving flow in our daily lives, whether at work, in sports, or during moments of creative expression.

Throughout the episode, Steven Kotler's deep expertise and passion for the subject shine through, leaving listeners with a profound understanding of how flow can be a game-changer in achieving peak performance.

If you're curious about the neuroscience behind flow and eager to explore the possibilities of unlocking your full potential, this episode is a must-listen. Steven Kotler's compelling insights and practical guidance will inspire you to embark on a journey of heightened creativity, productivity, and fulfillment.

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Duration:: 58m
Broadcast on:: 03 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

As you probably noticed this month, we're bringing you our "Life of Purpose" series and revisiting some of our most transformative episodes, tune in to explore expert insights and practical strategies on health, performance, and community well-being, all aimed at helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll not only get recaps of the key ideas in each interview, but at the end of the series, you'll receive our free "Life of Purpose" ebook. What you have to do is go to unmistakablecreative.com/lifepurpose, again, that's unmistakable Flow follows focus, right? The state can only show up when all of our attention is focused in the right here right now. Evolution shaped what we now know of as 20. There are probably more, but we know of 20 triggers. These are things that drive attention into the present moment. And people who have extremely high flow lives, lots of flow in their life, the first thing they've done is they've sort of built their lives around these triggers. And the funny thing about them is, and I'll walk you through a bunch of them, the funny thing about them is none of them are complicated, none of them are super sexy. I'm Sreeny Rao, and this is the unmistakable creative podcast, where you get a window into the stories and insights of the most innovative and creative minds who've started movements, built driving businesses, written best-selling books, and created insanely interesting art. For more, check out our 500 episode archive at unmistakablecreative.com. Steven, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Great to be here. Yeah. So, you know, I, you know, have been familiar with your work for quite some time. We had you literally right back when we started the show when your other book rise of Superman came up, and I am a big fan of, you know, all of your work. But part of the reason I wanted to bring you back this time is, you know, people who are listening know that we are in the midst of our own launch for our own book, Unmistakable Light Only Is Better Than Best, and you're one of the people that's actually featured in the book, specifically around the subject of flow. And I wanted to do a very deep dive into flow, how we create it, what the impact of it is. But before we get there, I want to ask you some stories about your, you know, questions about your personal story. And I want to start with this question, which has been really informative and eye-opening. What did your parents do for a living, and how did that impact the choices that you've ended up making with your life? My parents, my mom was a teacher, and my father was a, he was an accountant, and he was an insurance salesman, and then he sold mutual funds, and actually started out playing baseball. So what was the impact of those careers on what you ended up doing? Like how did that affect your choices? You know, what really affected my choices was the fact that my parents were really poor when they, when I was born, and like their combined income was, you know, less than a couple thousand dollars a year. They were very young, and they had no clue how to raise a kid. And my mom compensated by reading to me. Everything and anything should come back from library stacks of books that were, you know, six feet high, which, you know, I wrote my first poem when I was four, which was weird because it took me a really long time to speak, and they thought something was really wrong with me, but I wrote my first poem when I was four, and the only reason that could have happened is just massive exposure to kind of words. So I really think what helped me most and shaped me most is my parents had no clue what to do to raise a kid in their early 20s, and, you know, their response was books. And I think the other thing, you know, I grew up in the Midwest, and what I saw from my father, and what came at me that way, and you talk to Annie Midwestern, a little tell the same thing, Midwestern values, one way or another are work hard and don't lie. And I like those are pretty good values to start with. So, you know, I think from my mother, I got the love of language, and really early on I learned that books are where they keep the secrets, and which is, you know, the best, less than ever, because if you're not, you know, a natural, born genius, which I was not, you know, books are the only way you can get smart. I love that. You know, one thing that's really interesting to me about this is that you come from this environment, which really, in many ways, is not ideal to lead to the kind of outcomes that you've had in your life, like writing really, you know, like having an illustrious career as a writer, something that's sustained itself for many years, he said almost 28 years when, you know, right before we hit record. So I'm curious, you know, having studied the people that you have to the work that you've done and the people that you've been exposed to, why do you think that certain people become a product of their environment or a negative product of their environment and other people overcome their environments, and if, you know, like, how do you account for that difference? So a really interesting question, and it's a broader question to me than the way you asked it. And what I mean by that is as a journalist, even as an author in my work to float, you know, I'm probably going to take your pick, you know, any incarnation of Stephen, I was fascinated by people who were interested in taking on impossible challenges, right? So if we were talking about technology, I was interested in the people who were turning science fiction into science fact, and, you know, those were the people I profiled as a journalist for years and years and years that was sort of one of my beats. And, you know, I was also interested in sort of the same questions in the arts. What does it take to make paradigm-shifting music or, you know, literature, those sorts of things. So those questions always kind of fast that made it me across the board and the thing that I have found, and I don't know if there's probably a bunch of answers to your questions, right? And if you have a question below, it's probably really high up there. But everybody I've met has ever made a dent to use Steve Jobs' word is ferocious. People who invented, you know, Tomorrowland were ferocious about bringing the future into being the athletes who kind of pushed kinesthetic plausibility farther than ever before were ferocious. But I don't mean they weren't playful or they didn't have a good time, but they were ferociously devoted to their vision and obstacles didn't matter. And I'll give you, let me put a context around that. I thought for a really long time that kind of my journey to write or dumb was special, unique, interesting. I had a very difficult time coming up. I was, they nearly failed me my senior year because my poetry offended the school. I was thrown out of my creative writing program as an undergraduate. I was then sort of sort of later invited back. It took me 17 publishers, said no to my first book, it took me 11 years to write it. There were, you know, there were a lot of those things, the job I spent 10 years getting at GQ. I got Lyme disease and spent three years in bed and lost the job, you know what I mean? And then the publishing market vanished. And you know, I thought, oh my God, I succeeded over crazy odds and, you know, I remember being at Singularity University had listed it Dan Barry, give a lecture, Dan Barry. It's a three-time space shuttle astronaut and he was a contestant on Survivor and did pretty well, by the way, and runs a very large robotics company. And he was telling the story of his success. And in telling the story of his success, he was talking about the 17 or 18 times, Nashville rejected him. And it was, you know, just as funny and colorful and whatever as my story. And it was right at that time that I was sort of writing abundance and we were going over a lot of Peter Diamandis' story. And I'd known Peter forever, but I was getting reacquainted with kind of his history. And I was like, he is a history match, Dan's history match, my history. And so what I mean about ferocious is just you wake up in the morning and you just have to do this thing. And that's what, and that's just get, and everything else is hogwash. That's what I've seen is the difference. Wow. Summer is supposed to be an opportunity to slow down. But when you look at your kids, you can't help but notice that your kids are growing up fast, help them build confidence as they grow. 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Mint Mobile unlimited, premium wireless, $30, $30, $30, $30, $30, $30, $20, $20, $20, $20, $20, $20, $50, $15, $15, $15, $15, $15, $15, $15, $15, $20, $15, $15, $15, $15, $15, $15 bucks a month. So give it a try at midmobile.com/switch. 45 dollars up front for three months plus taxes and fees, promoting for new customers for limited time. Unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month. Slows. Full turns at mintmobile.com. I'm curious, you mentioned that you've persisted through all the sentence. It's funny because you're right. Like, if I were to go back and you look across 700 interviews that I've done here at The End Mistakeable Creative, I can honestly say that sort of hero's journey and the redemption that comes after going through the crucible is kind of a part of every story. In fact, probably, unconsciously, I look for that in every single person that I interview. And if it's not there, I'm like, there's nothing here. There's nothing interesting. If you haven't gone through hell to get to where you're at, I'm like, how is this going to be riveting in any way at all? Why do you think certain people quit in the face of those odds? Because-- Well, let's be really specific. Let's talk about-- let me give you a writing example, although I've seen this happen to friends of mine in kind of every creative medium. But this is-- so there are two early fail points for creatives. The first fail point is poverty. It is really hard to figure out how to get paid in any way that's sustainable doing this stuff. In the beginning, for me, it meant bartending till 4 in the morning, sleeping an hour and getting up and starting to work on my book, because editors would start calling me at 8 o'clock in the morning, and I had to be ready for it. And just not sleeping for five or six years. But everybody goes through that where you're working two, three jobs, you're doing whatever. And the first whack of people are those people. And I also have discovered, by the way, people who come in with a trust fund or those things, they have another problem. They haven't had to work for it. So it's hard to take the criticism that comes from editors and whatever the things, the relationships you have to make, they don't need them as badly. So they screw them. People who have money screw up those early relationships because they're not precious. Other people, they may honor those relationships, but they just can't hack it, they can't take the poverty for so long. So that phase one is that. So your problem is either you're taking the easy road in and then it's really hard to accept the level of criticism that's kind of come your way or it's just too hard to pull it off. And at the same time that you're fighting that poverty battle, you actually have to develop your voice, right? Like you have to figure out who you are and what you can add to the creative conversation. And that's often a long process that's easily 10, 20,000 hours of work to get there. And the trick is, what's so crazy is, you think, fervently, every creative I know myself included because it believes that you're going to get to a certain point, you'll get a certain level of recognition status, whatever it is, where you actually get to be, whoever you are. And I'm just going to tell you my story, what happened to me. Can we swear on your podcast? Oh, yeah. Go for it. Okay, good. All right. Then I can tell you exactly how it happened. So I, after I wrote, after my first book had come out, so I was already a best-selling author and I was on staff at GQ and GQ in the '90s had assembled some of the best journalists in kind of the history of the world. It was like an all-star cast. And I was, you know, part of that all-star cast, I was the last guy brought on to GQ as a writer at large before the dot com crash. And it was exactly where I wanted to be. And then I got Lyme disease and I lost that job and I bankrupted myself trying to find a cure. And I have two different novels, one that I was writing when I got sick and one that I tried to write while I was sick, that are both sitting indoors because they're nonsensical because I wrote them while I had Lyme disease. And I came out the other end and I had no journalism career. I had lost my job and everything else. I got a gig from Wired. And literally, when I was on staff at GQ, Art Cooper kind of looked at this great lion of journalism, he used to like, "Love my stories." And if he didn't love the stories, he would call me up and be like, "Okay, this is great. This is fine. This is excellent." But where's that Steven Kotler thing? So I was totally supported for my voice. This guy loved my voice and it was awesome. And when I finally recovered from Lyme and my first job back, it was a gig with Wired as my first opportunity with them. And they, when they brought me in, my editor said, "Look, we want to do the kind of new journalism right, science right, and you've been doing for GQ, we just want to do it here with our content a little bit more." And I got a first story assignment from them and it was to cover this thing that went down on the Everglades. So I went down and I lived in a frickin' swamp with wind recovering from Lyme disease. Months in a swamp was not, you know, easy by any stretch to the imagination. And I came back and I spent a couple months writing the story and boy did I need the paycheck. And I turned it in and my editor called me up and like I loved it, I thought it was the best thing ever he called me up and he said, "Steven, dude, I just got to tell you this just one thing I don't understand." And I'm, you know, super arrogant thinking, "Oh, just one thing, I've got like one line in a paragraph defect, maybe I have to move paragraph, cool, to 5,000 nice, pay me." And I was like, "Yeah, Adam, what's that?" He said, "Every motherfucking word you wrote." He hated the entire thing. And I realized that I had a choice at that particular point in my life. Adam could have cared less about the Stephen Kotler thing or the best Stephen Kotler are. He wanted the best wired story I could write. He didn't want me to be creative. He wanted me to write a wired story. That was my job. That was what he hired me for. And I could do what most artists tend to do when faced with that, which is throw a fit. I say, "This guru is stifling my creativity. I don't want to work with him." All those things get really arrogant. That is the natural inclination. You don't want to have to give in. But the second challenge in a creative's life is once you develop a voice and can have a little bit of weight in this world, the second challenge always tends to be great. Now you've got to be creative for about a decade inside of other people's boxes. So the very thing that got you there isn't going to keep you there for the second transition. So people get kicked out early because it's too hard because of the poverty element. They get kicked out the second time because they think it's about them and it's not. All they've gotten that first ten years is the opportunity to play with the big boys for a little bit. And nothing is guaranteed. And it's hugely more complicated than the next level up because editors, producers, directors, anybody you're dealing with has less time, less bandwidth, and they're being asked for greater results. So you're more on your own and you have to do stuff that you've never done before. And it kicks a lot of people out. They feel stifled. They don't like it. They tend to burn out. You come through that and then you start to actually get to work on your own stuff. But at that point it's a, you know, that brings with it an entirely new set of problems, right? These are distinct stages in the careers of a creative. They happen about ten years apart and they're each big hurdles in their own right. And you've got to clear a lot of them and I think every kind of visionary activity, every creative activity comes with those kind of built-in sets of hurdles. And my answer, like why do you need to be super ferocious? Like for me there was no other options. Like if I didn't get up in the morning and write, I'm crazy. I'm unpleasant. I like, I can't live. I can't survive. It's not a choice, right? It's exactly what I want to do, but it's not an option. So you know, I have to find a way to make it work no matter what. And if that's not the situation you're in, I'm not sure how to tell you to be successful. I'm sure there are a lot of other pathways, but everybody I know has come up with the same ferocity and has come up through the pinball machine. It's interesting that you brought up this idea that for you there's no other option. I kind of look at it in a very similar way because I even opened my book by saying most people, they go down a conventional path and they have average results. They manage to keep their jobs and do all these things at work. I've been fired from every job I've been at. The results were abysmal so I had no other option but to make it work. I was like, you know, I saw nothing but dead ends if I were to do this the conventional way and I was like, okay, you know what, whatever it takes has just been my attitude towards the entire thing, the entire time, because like I said, I didn't have average results. They were abysmal. And I also think, by the way, everything we're discussing, right? If you, we haven't talked about flow yet, but everything we're discussing is essentially a flow trigger. So this kind of creative desperation will lead you towards a high flow life. So you will have huge boosts along the way to your productivity because of that, especially if you're doing it in any kind of conscious, you know, way, I guess, which one I'm trying to say there, you're going to stumble into a high flow life and you're going to get that boost. Right? Work is going to become play and flow is going to show up and drive it all forward. All right. So before we get there, you mentioned that there's been sort of multiple incarnations of your career. You know, like I've known you as an author, I know you do work on the flow genome project. I mean, of course, you know, when I had Selim Ismail here from Singular University, your name came up. So your name has come up in our show multiple times and, you know, I'm just curious what each incarnation has been of that work and then we'll get right into flow because that's what I want to spend the rest of our time talking about. You know, I always say I do six things in my life and I whittled it down to six things. One of them is writing. One of them is advancing flow science. They're kind of the same thing because I tend to write a lot about, you know, either write about disruptive technology or I write about human capability and human performance. And usually I'm writing someplace where they intersect. And this goes all the way back to my first novel. So I've sort of been circling the same topics my entire career and, you know, the research just built out of that. I started out interviewing neuroscientists about, you know, these topics I ended up with a little bit of domain expertise enough that the neuroscientists sort of said, "Hey, look, if you want to set up a flow research program, well, you know, we'll sort of back you on this." It led into kind of more serious research. So, you know, it's all moved that way. I haven't stopped writing. You know what I mean? Like, I still do everything I've always done and I do the flow genome project on top of it and I run an animal sanctuary on top of it and, you know, those things. I just like keep, like, I add another layer every 10 years or so. Yeah. I mean, it seems to me, I mean, at least when I look back at all the people that I've interviewed, that there are multiple incarnations to what they do. They're not limited by any one label. Like, you know, maybe people think of them as, you know, an author. Like, I look at it now and I'm like, "Wow, even though I'm an author, like, we've produced an animated series, we've produced an event, you know, we've interviewed people. It's like, we've done every weird imaginable thing. We're not just defined by this one thing that people kind of know us by. Well, it's also, I mean, let's not, you know, somebody asked me recently for sort of a look at my full CV. Like, they wanted to see the stuff in between the books kind of thing. But, you know, yeah, there's like thousands, there's a couple thousand articles, there's 10 books. There's also, you know, ad campaigns from like Taco Bell all the way up through like book campaigns, right? There's probably 40 or 50 that I never thought about the fact that I've written ad campaigns or marketing campaigns, but I've done tons of them as filler work along the way. There's a bunch of grants, things along like the full list of like everything I've actually tried to write along the way is vastly bigger than just the stuff that the people see. Yeah. Well, I think that just speaks to the whole idea of cumulative output being kind of the indicator of a thriving career. Like, you mean, that's one of the conversations I had with Ryan Holiday said, you know, most people don't see the stuff in between. They only see sort of the highlights and the peaks, but ultimately it's your cumulative output that matters. Ultimately it's also like your cumulative output, like, you know, creatives like to work, that's just really what it is, right? We like the, I like the, what it, one of the things that this is another derail point by the way, and this is I think the mark of kind of an actual creative in a weird way is I, for me, a story, let's say I'm writing a magazine article, it's done. My job is not to, you know, write a giant, the best story I could possibly write is to please my editor, that's my job. And so once that's done, I can get paid and get onto the next one, which means I have to have five ideas that are percolating, be writing five stories at once and, you know, I can't be attached to the outcome. I don't care what happens. Once my editor's pleased, I'm done. What it does out in the world doesn't matter to me. What I care about is can I get that next creative project, please, because I want to wake up and start writing. Well, I think that makes a perfect setup to talk about, you know, what I want to spend the rest of our time talking about, because, you know, in my own research of talking to people, you know, interviewing people, reading books like yours, reading books like mastery, it seems like flow is this sort of precursor to being able to achieve anything of great significance. It seems like it's essential for peak performance, like the two are inseparable. So I guess, you know, where I want to start really is by, you know, talking specifically about flow triggers and how we bring it into our lives on a more regular basis, because, you know, I think a lot of people, at least until you're, you know, like you become consciously aware of it, they're like, oh, I found flow, but I don't know how to reproduce that on a regular basis, because it just kind of happened. I think that is the core problem. And by the way, ancient problem, Plato, Plato talked about the fast and slow path to wisdom. And if the same, like you're looking the same dialectic, the fast path is, I discovered this crazy, altered state experience, a flow state experience, and I have no idea how to get back there. And I think that's very, very common. And, you know, the slow path is, hey, wait a minute, figure out how this works and how do I get back there? And, you know, the good news is over the past 25 years, neuroscience has been progressing so quickly, cognitive psychology is removing so quickly, that we actually have real answers to that question for the first time, you know, in history. So, what are the answers? Well, I mean, the short answer is flow follows focus, right? The state can only show up when all of our attention is focused in the right here, right now. Evolution shaped what we now know of is 20. There are probably more, but we know of 20 triggers. These are things that drive attention into the present moment. Some people who have extremely high flow lives, lots of flow in their life. The first thing they've done is they've sort of built their lives around these triggers. And the funny thing about them is, and I'll walk you through a bunch of them, funny thing about them is none of them are complicated, none of them are super sexy. They're all really unbelievably obvious and underwhelming on a certain level. And you know all these things fundamentally because your body is actually hardwired for flow. It's hardwired to move in the direction of peak performance if you can learn to hear the signals correctly. But so let's just talk about individual triggers. And you've got to think about these in terms of focus. Like the important thing is that these triggers drive focus on them now. First and most obvious one is passion and purpose. And people mystify these terms who add nauseam, they're crazy business buzzwords, and they have lots of different meetings, and there's lots of different ways you can break them down. And the story, what's important is we pay more attention to those things that we believe in. It's just that simple, right? Like one of the reasons it is so useful, we talked about it earlier, right? Like be able to do nothing else but be creative for a living is sort of, it's passion and purpose like you know, amplified to the empty degree, you have to do it, you have to succeed with it. There's no other option that's incredibly powerful focusing mechanism. Drives a lot of flow. Risk is really critical along these lines. He doesn't have to be physical risk. I study. There's been a lot of times studying, you know, action and adventure sport athletes. And when you see amazing amounts of physical risk, but it can be intellectual risk, psychological risk, emotional risk, creative risk, and it's totally subjective, right? Your risk threshold is not, my risk threshold is not a surfer like Laird Hamilton's risk threshold. They're at different levels. So all you've got to do is meet your own, but risk is a great trigger. Novelty is a phenomenal, phenomenal trigger, complexity, unpredictability, those three, and again, all of them drive focus, right? And underneath that focus, what you're really seeing is kind of neurobiological activity, right? A lot of these triggers drive, norepinephrine, endopamine. These are two performance enhancing, field good drugs, the brain produces, and they both massively enhance focus. So with, you know, a lot of these triggers, what you're seeing is, you know, these are things that are driving the brain into kind of better focusing brainwave states and releasing the neurochemicals we need to drive focus. And it kind of goes from there. And you know, some of them like, I'll give you a great example where people get this one wrong all the time. Clear goals is a flow trigger. And when people hear that, they hear the term goal, and they ignore the term clear. We're very kind of goal oriented here in Western culture. So we think about the end result, and that's not the point at all. If you think about the end result, the goal, you're going to pull your attention out of the present moment. Clear goal means I got a list. I know what I'm doing right now, and I know what I'm doing immediately afterwards. I know where I'm at. I know what comes next, so I don't have to pull my attention out of the present moment and wonder. The minute you start pulling your attention out of the present moment, you pre-frontive cortex starts to kick back in, your sense of self, those things, things that kick you out of flow, and start to resurface so you don't want to give them the opportunity. So, you know, peak performers surround themselves and their activities with all of these triggers. Okay. Wow. That was just gold. So I have a couple of questions about this, specifically because it's something that I've found in my own experience, and this is about technology, distractions, apps, all this other shit that kind of competes for our attention because you've got to focus on attention multiple times when you mentioned all of the flow triggers, and, you know, right when you and I were exchanging emails, I said, I'm not usually on email until after 10 a.m. because it messes with my ability to stay in flow. And I've actually noticed this pattern pretty consistently because, you know, my next book is all that habits. I'm sitting here thinking, okay, like I can pinpoint exactly what produces flow on a regular basis. I do a routine of a thousand words in the morning, meditation and exercise, and then don't, you know, log into any weird social media services or Facebook or any of that. I get this sort of sustained creative state throughout the day. But the amazing thing is the moment I do that, it breaks. And even if I do it just for like a minute, it breaks. So I'm very curious because, you know, Kell Newport wrote a book called Deep Work, which you may have read where he talked extensively about how this actually does a lot of damage to our ability to get into flow. And I'm, you know, based on your research, I'm really curious to hear kind of the role that technology, distractions and all these other things in our lives play in all of this. So I'm going to come at it from both the front and the back end. I got two answers for you. The first thing is, you know, when the flow genome project goes into work with any organization, it doesn't matter. One of the first things that, you know, you are absolutely correct. I get up at 4 a.m. and I write from 4 a.m. until 8 a.m., no cell phone, no email, no Facebook, no Twitter, no anything, no phone calls. It's, you know, absolute silence, absolute darkness, and, you know, I'll use that focus for you. So all I'm literally looking at is a page of words. There's nothing else in my visual field. I, you know, put headphones in and Ryan Holiday and I are the same unless we tend to listen the same soundtrack over and over. So, you know, it works the same way. So like, you know, I spent four hours a day, you know, immersed in it and then I have different, you know, different times. I pop back out for a little while, but I do this, I exercise it two different times in the day. Same thing, like long and tense focus section followed by exercise, you know, followed by food and then I'll multitask for a little bit. And then I will nap and exercise and do another writing session and do an editing, you know, same thing you're doing, kind of thing. And I think everybody, you know, and Maslow found this, you know, way back when in the 50s when he was studying, he was one of the first studies of success and he was looking at the most successful people he could find. And, you know, one of the things he discovered is they all used different kind of techniques, what, you know, Albert Einstein used to famously roll boat into the middle of the lake to even stare at the clouds, right, whatever, they used these techniques to kind of shift their consciousness and bring on flow states and use that to drive creativity. And most of them cut themselves off from the world to do it. It's no different today, right? So you go into companies and we tell people that you can't, like, if your company policies, you have to respond to any email in 15 minutes and messages within two, you're out of your mind. Like, you're going to lose to companies that don't do that. Like, I mean, just, it's that, like, the techniques, like, the flow work that we're doing, we know from the Kinsey study that if our executives in flow are about 500% more productive than out of flow. So if they get two days a week in flow, they're a thousand percent more productive than the competition. Those are really big numbers, right? And, you know, Salim Ismail, who you mentioned, she's seeing similar things with this work with exponential organizations, right, that kind of level of, you know, that, that, that fast. So you have to spread it through the business world, to spread it through the creative world, right? Flow is, you know, being woven into lots and lots and lots of corporate strategies at this point, you know, at varying degrees and whatever. But those companies are just going to take off compared to, and everybody else is going to be left behind going, "How is that even possible?" Well, they turned off the, you know, they gave people 90 minute blocks to concentrate it. The same thing Montessori education does is why one of the reasons Montessori education is such a high-flow environment that's built around 90 to 120 minute blocks of uninterrupted concentration. Wow. Get back to school ready at Whole Foods Market. 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Dive into the captivating world of flow and neuroscience with renowned author and peak performance expert Steven Kotler, in this thought-provoking episode of Unmistakable Creative.

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