The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

The Neuroscience of Flow and the Rise of Superman with Steven Kotler

What makes people play at the top of their game? How does our ability to get into a flow state impact our work? Do Superman and extreme sports athletes have something that makes them tick differential that the rest of us? In this interview with Steven Kotler, we get into an incredible discussion about the neuroscience of flow. Here are some of the highlights from our chat

A Look at the early days of journalism, writing, and a creative career
Dealing with suicidal depression and lyme disease
The altered states of consciousness that led to healing
Why writing is about exploiting your curiosity
How hitting rock bottom can often open a world of opportunities
Understanding the definition of flow
What happens to a person when they are in a state of flow
Lessons learned about flow from the world of extreme sports
The role that risk plays in your ability to get into a flow state
Learning how to train the process of deep embodiment
Finding the midpoint between boredom and anxiety
How flow states significantly cuts the path to mastery
The distinction between overachievers and underachievers
Why guilt and vanity are horrible drivers of success
The 3 things that you put together to create flow states
Why You Can't Use the Mind to Get Away from the Mind
Looking at the role your upbringing plays in your talent
What happens you see the impossible done at a really early age
The importance of training your ability to commit to your goal
Learning how to cultivate your ability to imagine the impossible
Finding new metrics which allow you to measure yourself

Resources and People Mentioned

The Rise of Superman

Alex Jamieson on the Making of Super Size Me

Steven Kotler is an American bestselling author, journalist, and entrepreneur. His articles have appeared in over 70 publications, including The New York Times Magazine, LA Times, Wired, GQ, Discover, Popular Science, Outside, Men’s Journal, Details and National Geographic Adventure. He is best known for his non-fiction books, including the New York Times bestseller Abundance, A Small Furry Prayer, and West of Jesus.

A Look at the early days of journalism, writing, and a creative career
Dealing with suicidal depression and lyme disease
The altered states of consciousness that led to healing
Why writing is about exploiting your curiosity
How hitting rock bottom can often open a world of opportunities
Understanding the definition of flow
What happens to a person when they are in a state of flow
Lessons learned about flow from the world of...
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Duration:: 1h 20m
Broadcast on:: 24 Feb 2014
Audio Format:: other

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I came across you by way of our former guest, Michael Fishman, and when he mentioned that you had written one of my favorite surfing books, I thought, yes, absolutely, I'd love to chat with Stephen. I was like, wait a minute. It's the same Steve and Collar, so it's a real pleasure to have you here. I'm going to start with my first question. Can you tell us a bit about your background, your story, and how that has led you to doing the work that you're doing today and the new book? Well, my background is, I came on a college and a grad school as a creative writer. I was a novelist, and I fell into magazine journalism essentially as a way to pay the bills until my novels started making money and ended up switching into nonfiction fairly quickly after my first novel came out. But my early career, this was in the early '90s, and you could do any actions, you could surf or ski or rock climb or do anything like that. There was work, and I wanted work, and I loved those sports, even though I wasn't very good at them. I spent the first five to seven years of my career chasing professional athletes around the world, across mountains and up walls and whatnot, and probably broke a hundred bums along the way, no exaggeration. And that was sort of what led me into, that was half the story of what led me to where I am today, and the half of the story that led me there was as I got into action in veterinary sports, for example, I had been skiing my whole life. I started skiing when I was four years old by the time I got to college, I thought I was an expert skier, I ski bummed after college, and then I got sent my very first assignment to Chamonix with early extreme skiers, some Warren Miller guys. And I very quickly realized that kind of the gap between where I thought I was and where these guys were, it wasn't even fathomable. They were doing stuff that looked absolutely impossible, it was magical, it didn't make any sense to me, and year after year we kept all the journalists, all the people were covering these activities, we kept saying, well it's got to end, there's no way progression can keep going. What we're seeing is astounding, it doesn't make any sense, possible feet after impossible feet keep getting done, and you know, it never slowed down. That was the first thing that kind of led to rise at Superman is, almost 20 years progression in these sports continued to go up and up and up, and in fact, if you treat action and adventure sports like a data set, you plot it on a graph, what you see is nearly exponential growth in ultimate human performance, and that's performance when life or limb is on the line. Nothing like that has ever happened before, right? Sports performance is slow, it's steady, it's governed by the laws of evolution. At no point in history does it quintuple in a decade, right? We're surfing, you know, the sport we were talking about, you know, all alone is a great example of this, right? Here's a sport that dates back 1,000 years, and between the fourth century AD and 1996, the biggest wave anybody that ever served is 25 feet. Beyond that, everybody agrees from scientists to athletes, it's just impossible, and yet today we're pushing into 100 foot waves. So that was one half of the story. The other half of the story is in the middle of all this, when I was 30 years old, I got Lyme disease, and if you don't know what Lyme disease is like, it's sort of like the worst flu you've ever had crossed with paranoid schizophrenia, and I was in bed for years, almost three years, I was in bed, I couldn't move, I could barely walk, my mental function was completely gone, and by the end of the day, the doctors had pulled me off medicine because my stomach line was bleeding out, there was nothing more anybody could do for me according to them, and I was suicidal because I wasn't going to get any better according to them, and I was functional about 10% of the time, and it was just no way to live, and in the middle of this, when I was really serious about killing myself, a friend of mine showed up in my door and demanded that we go surfing, and it was an absolutely ridiculous, ridiculous, ridiculous request, and she was just a pain in my butt, and wouldn't leave and wouldn't leave and after about a couple hours of this, I guess, I said alright, whatever, I can always kill myself tomorrow, let's go surfing today, and I strobe into Sunset Beach, which as you know, it's the wimpiest beginner wave in the world, it was summer, right, so the waves were even smaller because it was summer, and the tide was out, and they literally had to walk me out to the break, literally like holding my arms, they brought me a surfboard, you know, the size of a Cadillac, and I sat down on it, and you know, it probably would be five years since I had surfed at that point, but a wave came, and it was maybe two feet high, but muscle memory took over, and I spun the board around, I've held twice, and I popped up, and I popped up into another dimension, I mean, and absolutely, my senses were incredibly heightened in time, it slowed to an absolute crawl, my vision felt like it was panoramic, and I felt amazing, I mean, I felt better than I had in years, and I felt so good that I caught four more waves that day, and after that fifth wave, I was totally disassembled, they drove me home, they put me into bed, people had to bring me food for 14 days, because I couldn't walk to my kitchen to make a meal, and on the 15th day, which is the day I could walk, again, I went back to the ocean, I did it again, and once again, I had this wildly altered state of consciousness, and you know, felt great, came back, came home, and I did it again, and over the course of about six months, when the only thing I was doing differently was going surfing and having this very strange altered state of consciousness, I went from about 10% functionality back up to about 80% functionality, and in the middle of this, the core question was what the hell is going on, and what I learned is the same thing that helped me go from absolutely completely sub-optimal back to normal, in a crazy short period of time, was the exact same thing that these other athletes were tapping into, that was letting them push performance through the roof, and that's the state known to researchers' flow. So let's do this, let's start at the kind of the middle of this, I guess not exactly the beginning, I mean I love that your life started out as a creative writer and a novelist, it's interesting because I see you taking a skill and apply it to a diversity of different things, which I think is absolutely necessary in the world that we live in today, the whole idea of sort of a set straight and narrow career path, I think has been just dismantled before our eyes, and as somebody who's been around this world for a long time, I'd really be curious to hear your thoughts on that, and then I want to start getting into the gist of our, the bulk of what I want to talk about, which is everything you've just mentioned. So do you want me to drill down into multiple career paths? Yeah, I mean it seems like there wasn't really a set, you know, like you don't seem to have a straight and narrow path, and I don't think that most of us do. I totally agree with you, obviously there is, there is no straight and narrow path at all, I don't know if there ever was, but certainly there isn't anymore, and I started out, you know, as a journalist and as a, as a novelist, went into fiction writing very quickly, you know, in my career, when I published my first book, I'll tell you the story, I did a giant reading in Cleveland where I grew up, and 150 people had driven through a blizzard to get to the bookstore, to hear me read from my first novel, and I bored the ever living shit out of that, I was terrible, and I like, I was terrible, I lost people, I wasn't connecting with the audience, and I went, oh my God, writing is only half the ballgame. The other half of the ball, I have to figure out how to be on stage, I got to figure out how to perform, I have to figure out how to talk to journalists, I got to figure out how to talk on radio, how to, you know, all those things were skills, and I very quickly realized that I never thought I was smarter than anybody, I just figured I could out work anybody, and I just followed my curiosity in every direction, that was, I always, whenever I teach writing, I always say, look, the name of the game is exploit your curiosity, everywhere you're interested in something, and you can drill down into it, especially if those, those curiosities intersect, two or three come together, you've got a great story there, and you have to have to be able to follow that curiosity out to just make a living, you have to produce so much content. During the 90s, I, and I don't know if this is true or not, but the editors I worked for used to tell me that I was the busiest and best paid freelancer in America, and I mean, the only reason I did that is because I was terrified that I wasn't gonna be able to pay rent the next month, so I had to have 50 things going at once, otherwise I wasn't sleeping at night, but, you know, and I think it's only gotten kind of more difficult, yet more interesting today. The difference is now what used to be kind of just small directions you can push into because the, you know, the law of niche is the internet, say we can now, you know, reach anybody who shares our curiosity, every one of those curiosities can essentially blossom into something, you know, maybe it's something you want to build a business upon, maybe it's a DIY, or maybe it's whatever, right, but that sort of me, you know, what used to be is now tenful, but what's available and what you can do with it because of what's happened with social media, et cetera, is amazing. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, and I love that you brought up curiosity. I mean, I think that that's one of those things that I tell everybody, I'm like, you know, let that be your driving force because that to me, I mean, I say, you know, curiosity has led to billions of dollars in value being created for people. I mean, I think that almost some of the most amazing, you know, companies and ideas in history are driven by curiosity. It's like, you know, hey, let's see what happens as kind of my default approach to anything that I do these days. I always think that there's, you know, at the Flow Genome Project, our motto is conduct the experiment, first of all. So, you know, always, always, you know, I brought up business based on that idea, but I, you know, one of the things I always, I always talk to companies about when I'm working with companies. I don't do this very much anymore. But there was a while where I was working with a lot of companies helping them kind of just understand the power of narrative storytelling and I'm saying, look, it doesn't really matter what it is you're doing. Chances are there's this, what you're doing is a voyage of discovery. Somebody somewhere had a question and that question got answered and led to another question, that led to another question somewhere down the way that led to whatever which it is, it is that you're producing. But there's a narrative there and that narrative is deeply fascinating because it's just about deeply, you know, curious people chasing down really strange shit. Mm-hmm. Definitely. What's this? Let's shift gears a little bit and let's start talking about this point in your life in which you have Lyme disease. I mean, you know, you're 30 years old, you're practically incapacitated. I mean, I can't imagine as somebody as a, who's built their living as a creative person to lose your, you know, not only your physical, but your mental capacity that didn't take its toll on you. And you know, I'm really curious because I think that we're, it's interesting, right? We're in this really strange sort of phase of society right now where, you know, opportunities are at our fingertips like never before, but there's almost an epidemic of dissatisfaction with what we're doing with our lives and our careers and people are trying to break out of it. And kind of what, how that shaped your whole perspective on life and, and, you know, careers and, and, you know, what matters after you've been through something like that? Well, I mean, I look at Lyme disease as the best thing that ever happened to me. It, you know, as a writer forced me to change my writing style kind of fundamentally actually because the whole world had shifted while I was sick and the way I used to write was not the way that you could write anymore as a journal. So it, it switched that, but it also, you know, it led me to flow states, which has become where I've spent the past 15 years as a writer, as a researcher, I wrote about him in West to Jesus, I wrote about him in small, furry prayer. We skipped over them in abundance, though they, that kind of, that threat is rekindled in rise of Superman and abundance gets tied into flow too. So it's become kind of the center point of my entire life and everything I do. So it's shaped and changed everything completely. Yeah, you know, it's, it's interesting. I think we both share a common story, you know, I mean, I, I think for me, when I started to surf, you know, most people know this, I was, it was the low point in my life. And what was really weird to me about it that I could, I said, you know, in theory, I should be miserable. I'm like, I'm broke. I'm 30. I'm at my parents' house. And yet I was just delighted, you know, that, that I remember strangely as one of the happiest times in my life because I was in the water for six hours a day, which I think, you know, makes a perfect setup to really get into the gist of what I want to talk about here, you know, for the rest of our conversation, which is this whole idea of flow states because I mean, flow states, you know, before you and I hit record here, we were just talking about this concept that once you can learn how to figure out, you know, how you get into the flow states, your whole life changes. And I think that that's, it's one of those things that you and I can sit here and talk about. It's easier said than done. It sounds really nice. And it's like, hey, we've read the Mihaelis, this isn't, I don't even know how you say his last name, but the book flow, we've heard about this endlessly, but you know, this all sounds nice in theory, but come on guys, you know, not all of us can hop on a surfboard and get in the water. So, so let's, let's get into this and I'd love to hear it through the lens of all these extreme athletes. So let's talk about this in a bit more, in quite a bit more detail. Well, let's start with it with the definition, right? Let's, what is flow? Technically, it's defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we perform our best and we feel our best, right? In the state, inflow, our focus tightens so completely on the task in hand that everything else falls away. So action and awareness start to merge. The doer and the beer become one in a philosophical sense, your sense of self disappears. Time gets really wonky. It slows down sometimes. So you get that freeze frame effect like in a car crash. Sometimes it speeds up and five hours will pass by in five minutes and all aspects of performance, mental and physical go through the roof, right? And we knew this, you know, we've known this as, as you pointed out, chicks sent me high, coined the term back flow back in the 60s and 70s and by the way, he called it flow because inflow, that's really the sensation you inferred. Every action, every decision leads seamlessly, fluidly to the next. Very liquid. So big, very liquid state is like being swept up in the river of ultimate performance. What has happened since chicks sent me highs day and where kind of it moves out of, we've all heard this term and, you know, we'd all like more of it, but how do we do that is there has been an absolute revolution in neuroscience and technology. And we can now peer under the hood. We know in a general sense, what's causing the state and knowing what's causing the state has allowed us to work backwards to how do we get more of the state and going from there, we get into the access board athletes because what they have figured out how to do is pack their lives with the triggers that bring on the state. And that's really what's driven performance. Well, let's do this, let's reverse engineer this because I'm guessing the question on everybody's mind is, okay, well, then how the hell does that apply to me? I'm not streaming and I'm not Steven, there's no ocean near me and I'm not about to hop on a 70 foot wave. You brought up sort of figuring out what, you know, these people have packed their lives with the triggers that cause these states. So let's break this down for the everyday person who basically is just kind of going through the motions of life, is this even, is this accessible and if so how? So here's the great news. Not only is it accessible, it has been, you know, it has been shown across the board to have the life performance every place, not just in athletics. So when Shek sent me high did his original research, one of the core findings was flow as ubiquitous. Everybody anywhere can experience the state provided certain initial conditions are met, right? So for example, the amplification we're seeing in action sports, that's just one version of what we're seeing. McKinsey and company, the big business research firm, did a 10 year study recently where they looked at top executives and flow and they found that top executives report being five times more productive inflow than out of flow. The reason action and venture sport athletes have hacked the state so specifically comes down to necessity, right? In all other walks of life, flow is great if it shows up, it's fantastic, but in action and venture sports, the upper edge, when you're pushing the limits of ultimate performance, it's not optional. These guys are getting into flow or they're going to the hospital or they're dying and a lot of them have died. You know what I mean? This has been a bold and brave quest to kind of hack this state, but what they have done and peeling back and looking into the hood and how does this apply to your readers, there are, we now know, 15 triggers for flow states. Three are environment or three are psychological. There's a social form in the state known as group flow where a bunch of people get into a flow state together. This is really common in startups or if you've ever seen a fourth quarter comeback in football work, it seems like everybody is always on the same page, every reason the right spot at the right time, that's a group flow state. So we know there are 10 triggers that bring on group flow. And we also know there's one, though this is going to change, so I'm sure there's more. And we just don't know yet, but there's one creative trigger as well. The action and venture sport athletes have relied most heavily on the environmental triggers and that's where I'll drill down and we'll see how we can apply this for anybody. Environmental triggers that these guys are pulling are first and foremost, is high consequences, right? Risk catches our attention. Flow always follows focus. If you want to drive the neurobiological change, you need really constantly focused concentration and risk is phenomenal for this. We're hardwired, hey, more attention and life is on the line. But the really good news is it turns out when you look under the hood, what you're really trying to get at is a neurobiological release of dopamine, one of the brand's kind of principal reward drugs that also enhances performance significantly. And it turns out can be triggered when you substitute for physical risk, mental risk, creative risk, emotional risk, social risk. So you can hack the high consequences, physical trigger that these athletes are pulling with all kinds of intellectual risks. And it's very, very, very, very different for each person. So you're talking about big wave surfers, Larry Hamilton, Ian Walsh. Yes, these guys have to paddle into a 40, 50 foot wave before they're paying attention. But for the normal average guy who's not an extreme athlete, if you're shy, walk across the room and talk to a pretty girl, that's enough to trigger the release of dopamine. Little tiny intellectual risks. I always tell writers if you're trying to trigger flow, one of the easiest ways to do it is to change your writing style radically. I'll go, for example, if I'm stuck on an article, I can't get it right. I'll start pulling books out of my bookshelf randomly and opening them up and I'll take the first sentence and I'll, you know, the book that I'm looking at and I'll replace all their words with my words, but I will keep their exact punctuation and their style and their rhythm because it forces me to take creative risks. And that's enough to hack the flow state. Another thing that these guys are doing is they're performing in what we call rich environments. A rich environment is a really fancy way of saying lots of novelty, lots of complexity, lots of unpredictability, but we can do this in our daily lives. You know, when I am trying to write on a subject, if I want to up the amount of novelty that I'm taking in as a writer, I will broaden my research to things that are kind of tangentially related. I'll follow my curiosity out a little bit, so I'll get all this stuff on the sides and my brain will start making those novel connections between ideas and it'll go someplace new. I will up the amount of novelty I'm putting into the task and this will do it as well. The other thing they're hacking is a little trickier, but it's called deep embodiment, which is a really kind of fancy way of saying all of your senses are firing at once. So not only using your five major senses, but proprioception, vestibular awareness, so balance and your body position in space. Actually, investors, board athletes are pulling these triggers all the time and one of the simplest ways to see it is, in normal daily life, we're gravity-bound creatures, so we don't often get to experience zero Gs, multiple Gs or polyaxyl rotation, which is rotation around one's middle. These three are really common in action in adventure sports and they're big triggers for the body to pay attention to something new is going on here. But there are all kinds of ways to train up deep embodiment. All you're trying to do is drill down into your concentration scheme so you can yoga, train up deep embodiment, almost any kind of physical practice where you're aware of your body, a lot of meditation techniques as well. So you can essentially have workarounds for these same triggers, the action in adventure sport athletes are pulling and just incorporate more of them into your daily life. And I just gave those three because though the environmental triggers are specifically the ones that these athletes are pulling more than other people, right? The other triggers are everywhere and easy to pull. Like they can be incorporated in anything they have nothing to do with sport or athleticism. I love that. I mean, it's such an interesting way to look at this because I think that, yeah, I mean I had no question in my mind that the first thing I thought was, okay, well, this sounds all well and good if you're an extreme athlete. But go ahead, sorry. All right. Oh, I'm sorry. Please. I want to dig a little bit deeper into this idea of risk, right? I mean, you talked about, you know, all these different risks, creative risks. And it's funny because, I mean, the biggest risks I've taken with my writing were, you know, honesty and it's strange, right? The more vulnerable and the more honest I became, the more I actually wanted to do it, the more addictive it became. There was something about it that I couldn't get enough of. It was like, wow, I'm like, this is scary. I can't believe I just put this out there. And sometimes I thought, you know, this is a disaster. I really shouldn't put this out. And then you do and it resonates like never before and it becomes somewhat addictive. But I think that what I'm really curious about is how you build a tolerance for risk. Because, you know, we're talking about people like Laird Hamilton. I mean, I can tell you this, I can get out and I can surf a six to eight foot day. Once we get above eight feet, I look at the water and I'm like, yeah, I'm like, that probably is a day when I shouldn't be out there. I know, because I almost ground on a 13 foot day in Nicaragua. Let's talk about this more. We'll get into it. We'll be able to cover up a bit of ground because let's talk about one of the psychological triggers, which will also explain why surfing is such a hard sport and answer your question. So one of the psychological triggers is what's called the challenge skills ratio. So emotionally flow is sort of found not on, but near the midpoint between boredom and anxiety, right? This is perfectly heightened attention. So if you're, if the waves are too small, you're not paying attention, right? They have to be in your sweet spot. If you pay attention, if they get too big, if they push out of that sweet spot, right over six feet or whatever, then the challenge level goes up and you slip closer into fight or flight responses and you actually block the neurobiology of the flow response. So flow exists when the challenge is when we actually have a number for this. It's roughly 4% greater than the skills you bring to bear. That's the sweet spot. Now here is where people screw this up. People who are super high achievers, who are really, really driven. They blow by 4% without even thinking about it. You're comfortable in four to six foot ways, but there you are paddling out in 13 foot waves, right? Uh huh. Because you're a high achiever and you're going to go for it. And sometimes that's fine, right? You get you butt kicked and you learn a little, but it's not going to drive you into flow. Other achievers have a different problem, which is 4% is roughly the point at which you get pretty uncomfortable. You're not, you're, you're, you're, you have to be paying a lot of attention, right? And when you're still comfortable, you're not totally paying attention. You have to be out of that sweets out of that comfort zone a little bit. You want to stretch, but not snap. So the answer, and this is really funny, um, I talked to Ian Walsh in, and this is in surprise, but we talked about the day that so you, as you know, toe surfing was invented because nobody could paddle into a wave that was over 25 feet, right? So Larry and, and the, and the strap crew invent toe surfing. And then, you know, a bunch of years later, Ian Walsh comes along and says, Hey, wait a minute, I think I can paddle into these waves. And he does it. He, you know, he goes out one day with a couple of friends, they go to jaws and he paddles. I think of that day was 50 feet. He paddles into a 50 footer. And he reverses what is, you know, 900 and some odd years of surf floor. And, you know, as Susan Casey talks to scientists when she wrote The Wave and they all talk about how it was impossible to do this. And yet he did it. But if you ask Ian, you're like, dude, what was it like to paddle into waves that big? What was that day like at jaws? His answer is it was another day at the office. And that's the point. The reason we look at something like Laird Hamilton or Ian Walsh in a 100 foot wave and go, what the hell is that? We got a pattern recognition system at the heart of our brain. And when the pattern recognition sees something where it cannot figure it out, right? And it's never seen anything like a 100 foot wave, it says, Oh, well, this is impossible. I could never do that. But what you don't see are the days and weeks and, you know, years of two foot surf and three foot surf and five foot surf and seven foot surf and 15 foot surf and they are pushing it up four percent and four percent and four percent and four percent. What you're looking at is the long learning curve expertise. Now, I will tell you, and this is where things are really cool. If you know what you're doing, flow because flow significantly, you know, that we've all heard about like the 10,000 hours to mastery flow significantly shorts. In fact, in some research, it almost cuts it in half. And I'm not, you know, this is research performed, for example, DARPA, the military did a study training snipers and flow names who induce flow artificially with transcranial magnetic stimulation. Don't ask. It's a long story, but I can explain it if you want. But they found that snipers improved 200 to 500 percent faster than normal. So this has been extremely well documented. And the reason it happens is flow is a very profound cocktail, five of the most potent neural chemicals ever created show up during flow. Now this is, you could tell you how flow is addictive. These are the five most potent pleasure chemicals the brain can create and the only time it creates them all at once is during flow. So you're absolutely right. Once you taste this experience, you want more and more and more. Scientists talk about it as a source code of intrinsic motivation. The flip side is the more neural chemicals you get during experience, the better chance that experience moves from short term holding to long term storage. So it's, which is essentially learning. So during flow, the stuff we're learning and flow, all these neural chemicals are showing up and they're big neon blankness science saying, remember me, save me for later, save me for later. So all this stuff is getting locked in. So you can shorten the path to mastery and you see that in action and venture sports a lot. But the other side of the coin is to get back to your original point. When you're looking at what they're doing, these are guys who have leveraged flow very specifically, they figured out exactly what their sweet spot is for kind of maximum attention and they have remained fiercely, fiercely true to that for long periods of time. And I have to tell you, by the way, I picked up downhill mountain biking four years ago, five years ago when I first moved to New Mexico and I started riding with a bunch of pro riders around here and I was, I mean, I kept falling and breaking bones and killing myself. And all that's, and finally I said, you know what, I'm going to stop chasing these guys around mountains. I'm going to just, I'm going to apply my flow research. I know I'm going to only push up like 4% and no matter what, I have to ride alone. That's what I'm doing. And it was the craziest thing in the world because I, you know, my progression was stutter stepped for that first year and a half. But once I finally just went, God, I know better. I should just get my ego out of the way and apply this stuff within a year I was riding with those guys just fine. Wow. All right. So a ton of questions from this. This has been my favorite part of the entire conversation. So many cool insights here. You brought up the idea of overachievers and underachievers and the reason I want to ask you this is it's a debate we've been having on the air, my business partner and I, and we've been having the conversation with our listeners about the role that talent plays in people's abilities to succeed. And you know, it's funny because Greg says it, you know, my business partner, he's like, he's coming to the conclusion that some of those things are things that you're largely born with. And you know, I'm very curious, is it possible to make a shift from being an underachiever to an overachiever? Because if you look at the first 10 years of my career and, you know, everybody knows this, I mean, I was fired from every single job I was ever at. 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Figure out what in your life is causing, you know, the most flow, and do more of that. Keep following that thread. Right. That, I mean, that's how you make the transformation, because you're talking about, and we talk about this all the time in the flow genome project, you know, great example is, is, is exercise, you know, gym memberships. Jim, Jim's exists, had this business model, right, where all these people, New Year's resolutions, guilt and vanity are driving them into the gym. And by February, they're all gone, right? There's like a 15% retention rate, and everybody else drops away. Guilt and vanity are horrible, horrible drivers. Money is a great dive driver up until that you make enough money to have your basic needs, Matt. But once you have that with a little left over, the science also shows it stops being a great driver. From that point on, the only things that really matter most are autonomy, mastery, and purpose, and when you put all those three things together, you get flow states. So, you know, you figure out what it is that is causing you the most flow, and you do it in multiple areas, right? Like you have flow from surfing, and you get flow from writing. People who are good at this, the action of extra sport athletes, have packed their lives with things that produce flow. Why? Because you're training the brain. It's plastic. The more flow you get, the more flow you get, and it doesn't matter, it switches disciplines. If I want to up my writing, one easy way to do it is to go skiing more, because skiing will throw me into a flow state really, really quickly, and it'll carry over. I'll have an easier time getting the flow the next day when I sit down to write. Mm-hmm. Well, it's funny. I mean, none of this is shocking to me because, you know, it's interesting you talked about how the transformation occurs by paying attention and focusing your efforts on the things that produce more flow states, because that's exactly what happened to me. The more, you know, I always said surfing started as just surfing, and it started to bleed into every other area of my life. It was kind of the driving force. It was like, "Okay," and, you know, even for writing, it's like the days that I've been in the water a lot, the writing is a thousand times better, and it's a lot easier. Well, and by the way, this is... So Theresa Maudley's researcher at Harvard discovered let's just take creativity. Creativity is massively amplified in flow for a whole variety of reasons. Neurobiologically, the neurochemicals that show up, for example, dopamine and norepinephrine, not only do they enhance focus, but they lower signal the noise ratios on the brain, which means they up pattern recognition, which is your ability to link ideas together. An antonine, which is another neurochemical that shows up during flow, expands the database searched by the pattern recognition system. So normally, when you ask the brain a question, like, you know, solve this sentence for me, it's going to search kind of nearby local networks. It's not going to search the whole brain. It's not going to look through ancient memories about grandmother, grow about grandma, for like new ways to write this sentence better. That's just not how we work, but inflow, because of changes in neurochemistry and neuroanatomy and a bunch of other stuff, it searches the whole database. So you're getting more, you're taking in more information per second, right? Because the massively heightened focus, more pattern recognition, so you can link that new information to old ideas to create something new, which is what creativity is, and the database being searched by the pattern recognition system is so much larger. So what this happened, which means is that not only is flow heightened in a flow state, but because of the application of learning and memory and a bunch of other stuff, Theresa and Mobley at Harvard discovered that people are more creative the day after a flow state, which seems to suggest, and there's more research that needs to be done, but it seems to suggest that like creativity, this massive skill that people have such a hard time teaching is actually the flow being in flow trains the brain across the board to be more creative. So you're not only just, and the heightening in the state, I just want to get back in this for half a second, we just did a preliminary survey. We've seen some really crazy statistics on how much is creativity heightened in flow, really, really whack and stuff, and we couldn't figure it out. So we decided to do our own research on this and we sent out a giant survey. Most people say it's seven times as creative as normal, which is a 700% boost in creativity and flow. So it's this gaudy, ridiculous number brought on by this profound neurochemical, neurobiological alteration. So of course, you're getting way more done outside of the flow state, and it's part of the benefit, but it's the point, I guess, that you're making and that we've kind of encircling around is you've got, there's a certain point in which you, you know, I was driven there by Lyme disease. I came out of the other side of Lyme disease and said, I am only going to do things that matter because I was almost dead. And I threw everything out of my life, except, you know, I literally kept six things period that was, and that's why that's all I do. And all except for one, and that one is sort of the hardcore just driving my business forward stuff that doesn't tend to produce a lot of flow, all the other five are flow triggers. So, you know, you have to at some point make that leap of faith, right? You've got there because the economy sucked in 2009, you didn't have a choice, right? You were just like, I'm going to surf all the time, and suddenly it opened all these other doors. That was essentially, you know, I came out of, I came out of Lyme surfing and writing, and I was like, you know, these are the two things that matter most. This is all I'm doing from this point on. And everything else is just going to, you know, take care of itself, or I'm not going to bother me. What the hell? It was almost dead. Well, let me ask you this. On that note, you know, it's funny, I was reading Stephen Pressfield's The War of Art this morning, just, you know, part of my morning routine is to start with, you know, sentences from a few good books. And I got to this section where he talked about sort of, you know, people find that, you know, being close to cancer, near death experience, or whatever it is, or something traumatic happening, or something, you know, a significant emotional experience occurs in their life that causes them to start searching for the things that produce flow. And I'm wondering, is that significant emotional experience necessary? And if so, and you don't have trauma or something that is a trigger for it, how do you bring it about? So that's a really interesting, smart question. And I don't know, but let's talk about one other, but let me take a stab at something. So one of the other things that causes flow is large portions of the prefrontal cortex shut down. So the prefrontal cortex is where your ego lives, where your sense of self lives. Why does time get wonky and flow? Because time is calculated all over the prefrontal cortex. And as parts of it start to shut down, we can no longer separate past from present from future. So we're plunged into this elongated now. The whole point of this is one of the things that happens in flow, you know, is your dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex shuts down. That's the inner critic. That's the voice in your head, that nagging, doubting, fearful voice that's always there. It goes away and flow. It literally that part of the brain winks off. One of the reasons the trauma, the kind of horrible emotional thing that you're talking about seems to maybe bring it on more is when you have those really difficult experiences, we know research shows that we are far more empathetic. We are far more open or far more vulnerable. Which is to say your ego, your inner critic is already partially shut down. So you may be, and this is hypothetical, you may be more susceptible to what they call transient hypo-frontality, which means the temporary deactivation of the prefrontal cortex. You may be more open to that. The problem that most people have, and this is where I think trauma gets at that, is you can't use the mind to get away from the mind, right? You can't, we've been, all the self-help stuff, all the psychological stuff, the 20th century, the talk therapy that like, you know, get down with your emotions, all this stuff, all you're doing is trying to use the self to run away from the self. And it doesn't work, right? The self is a tar baby. You can't, you can't do it that way. So I think the trauma makes you more vulnerable and more open to these experiences. But I think the point is that openness itself may be the trigger we're looking for. It certainly seems to be, like, if you go back to deep embodiment, one of the ways you can train up deep embodiment is literally by the practice of, you know, what the Buddhists call openness and what that really means is you're just listening to all the different sensory streams at once, you're letting all the information come in and trying not to judge it. That's a very egoless process, it shifts the ego to the side and it focuses your attention in the moment and on a lot of stuff at once. So it may actually be a fairly simple hack to get around that trauma, but you are right. It usually gets brought down by something. But I think that's a courage problem. I think the trauma is about, you know, it lets you know how short life is and you stop focusing on anything that doesn't have fundamental intrinsic value and it's got fundamental intrinsic value almost to you, almost by definition, it's going to trigger flow. And you know, people talk about passion all the time, right, figure out what you're passionate about. You've got to remember what's actually being said here. What you're passionate about is that stuff that grabs and holds your attention because the passion is really a combination of really focused attention and flow, right? That's really what the recipe is under the hood and belief, passion, all these things, these are just focus hacks, they're ways to tell the brain to pay a lot more attention. So again, I think the way around that stuff is simply by just hacking attention. Why wait for your life to fall apart? It's going to, but the other thing is I think most people, you know, sooner or later, you know, we see this all the time. Top executives, executive burnout is a really, really, really big problem. Usually early in your career, there's lots of exciting stuff going on, lots of stuff that, you know, drives a lot of flow. But as you get more advanced and more advanced, you get pushed out of your challenge, skills, sweet spot, the workload gets too high, you can't get into flow as easily, and you burn out. And the secret is to, of course, take it back, you don't have to get a new girlfriend and buy a new car, but you do have to, you know, start finding more flow. Uh-huh. You know, there's so much here, I mean, I love that you brought up the idea of an ego-less process and not judging it. You know, I just had, uh, not like Jamieson, who was a whole creator of super off-sized me here, and we're talking about how you deal with your past and how you deal with everything. She said, you know, it's largely, she said, it's a process of non-judgmental inquiry. And she said, if you keep judging everything that happens to you, you can't figure out what's right for you. And to me, I'm realizing, you know, it's really interesting to hear, you know, you talk about the voice in your head being shut off because I know the moment I drop into a wave, somebody asked me once, what are you thinking about? And I said, absolutely nothing. And that is why it is so damn addictive. Absolutely. I mean, surfing is great for that, right? You've got so much novelty and complexity, unpredictably, probably more than anything, any other activity. Because the wave changes shape and no two waves of the same. I mean, it's just the greatest driver of focus and attention you can imagine. Yeah, no doubt. Let's do this. Um, let's, let's shift gears a little bit. I want to start talking about the real Superman, uh, of this story. I mean, you know, you'd brought up people like Ian Walsh, people like Laird Hamilton. I mean, you know, I even saw the trailer for the rise of Superman. So I want to start talking about kind of, you know, what these people are like. I mean, you've talked a lot about flow and how it applies to us, but I mean, is there something inherently different? I mean, like when I look at Laird Hamilton, when I watch Step Into Liquid, I'm like, that looks amazing. I am never going to do that in this lifetime. It's just, I even with that 4% that you're talking about, you know, and I, you know, it's interesting because I think back to the beginning of surfing, and I remember I would open up surf line. I would say sweet. I'm like three feet. I can hack that. Now I open up surf line and I'm like, damn, I'm like, that's kind of small. And it's like, you know, unless it's four to six, I don't, you know, like when I look at four to six report, I'm like, sweet, I'm out of here for the day. And it's really interesting that my reaction to that report has continually changed as my standard for what I'm capable of change, but I'm wondering, I mean, is there something different going on in the brain of Laird Hamilton? Because if I saw a report that's at 18 to 20 feet, I'm like, you know, you know, gonna sit and watch from the shore probably for the rest of my life. Well, you got to, I mean, let's just talk about Laird for a second. Laird's father was Bill Hamilton, who was one of the most stylish and revered surfers of his day. Right? Laird's adopted father. Laird was out at pipeline when he was four or five years ago. The lifeguards used to have to rescue Laird about once a week at pipeline because he had kept causing some undercurrent, he pulled out. So that was his normal. What has happened with a lot of these guys, and this is complicated, but for a lot of reasons, our ability to imagine the impossible is almost everything in the ballgame, right? So where these guys started is a big deal. Ian Walsh grew up down the street from Jaws. A lot of these guys grew up in the mountains. They grew up, you know, getting used to extreme vertigo and things like that before they were, you know, nine, ten, eleven years old before their brands were fully formed. The thing about kids is one of the reasons you're seeing so much performance in action and adventure sports is every play I'll say else in the world, flow hacking has sort of become optional. But in action and adventure sports, you got to just stop and think about when I was growing up, the 360 and skiing was the hardest trick anybody had ever thrown, right? It's 360 degrees of rotation. That was just, that was it, you know, go back a couple of years and, you know, guys started throwing like triple off axis flips with four spins. That's seven times as much rotation, and that's the new normal, right? That's what these guys have been born into, and they're also being born into an environment where flow hacking, how do you get into the state? How do you play the mental game? Is taught at a really basic fundamental level? I mean, everybody made a huge deal about one of the guys who, Mike Treve is the high-performance psychologist for the Seattle Seahawks, and Pete Carroll had this, you know, radical new thinking where he would, you know, where he was teaching flow and focus and attention, and Mike Treve is actually one of the guys on the board of directors of the Flow Genome Project, and this was a revolution in football. They never thought to do this before, and yet in action in venture sports, kids of six and seven are being taught these tricks, so they're growing up in a world where flow hacking is part of the language, and where they're seeing the impossible dawn and it's such an early age, the bar is so high, so a lot of that has to do with, you know, geography plays a role. They're certain their genetics are going to play a role in a lot of this, right? I mean, when you drill into the hood, you read David Epstein's The Sports Gen, you figure out that, like, they say, hitting a baseball is one of the hardest things to do in sports. You read The Sports Gen, you figure out that 90% of it comes down to how good your eyesight is, right? Which is not something you would have, you would have really thought about it as something you didn't spell it out for you, but there you have it, and certainly we all have different kind of eyes. I think the bigger point, though, is, and this seems to be if you talk to a lot of the athletes, and not just the athletes, if you talk to the artists, the artists and athletes seem to be the two categories of people who are really best at flow hacking because they have to do it to make a living, surgeons as well, a couple other groups of people are really, really good at this stuff, and if you kind of drill under the hood and you talk to them, they will say, "Look, yes, I was probably born to do this, but the bigger point is everybody is born to do something, and figure out what it is that you were born to do and do that, and you will see the exact same kind of performance metrics that we're seeing in what you're doing." They figured out what it is that creates the most flow in their lives, and they did that with unbridled enthusiasm, right? And you know, I think the other thing that you have to remember, what you're looking at action in veterinary sport athletes, and this may be different, those guys, and you know this, they train commitment. Like when you're pulling into a big wave, you know that 90% of success is how much are you committing that wave? You don't go in with half measures. You paddle as hard as you can, you jump to your feet, you drive into that bottom term, and you do it with every single thing you have, and that's the only possible way to move forward. You have to commit. All these sports, you know, speed is your friend. So you need to commit to get at that speed, which is what's going to save your life anyways. And I think training commitment, training that like when you dive into something you dive with everything you have, I'm not sure we train that anyplace else as well as we train that in action sports, and I think that matters too. Oh, yeah. No doubt. I mean, it's funny. As I'm listening to you talk about this, I mean, what you're talking about doesn't just apply to action sports, it's life at large, but it's funny when you're talking about that process of going for a wave, you and I both know this, you know those days when you're paddling and you're thinking, damn, that drop looks big and you're hesitating, that's pretty much a guarantee you're not going to make it. And if you do, it's going to be a bumpy ride. Yeah, the whole thing is going to be unpleasant and worse. The worst thing that I've noticed with that thought is when you do make it, but you're so tense because you've had that negative thought ahead of time that you get bounced right into the impact zone and it takes a fall that like would have been kind of bad and turns it into the worst possible thing that could happen. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, here's one other thing. You mentioned about, we talked a little bit about how these guys grew up, but there's something that you said in there that really kind of struck a chord with me and you mentioned the idea of cult, the ability to imagine the impossible, which I love. I mean, I think that to me, that's, that's, that's everything. Is there a way we can cultivate our own ability to imagine the impossible? This Halloween ghoul all out with Instacart. Whether you're hunting for the perfect costume, eyeing that giant bag of candy or casting spells with eerie decor, we've got it all in one place. Download the Instacart app and get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Offer valid for a limited time, minimum $10 per order, service fees, other fees and additional terms apply. Instacart, bringing the store to your door, this Halloween. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. 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Forging ahead together drives Colorado's pioneering spirit at Chevron. We donate funding and volunteer thousands of hours in support of the community's we call home. We also employ our neighbors to deliver the energy needed as the state's largest oil and natural gas producer, all to help improve lives in our shared backyard. That's Energy in Progress. Visit Colorado.chefron.com. That's an interesting question. Actually, I have two contradictory answers to that question. One comes out of access for it, and one comes out of writing for me. One of the reasons I really believe I've had the career I've had as a writer is because when I started writing, I didn't ever think about competing on my peers or the people around me. I looked at guys like Thomas, Thomas Pinch and David Foster Wallace, the guys who were doing really complicated things with language and pushing in as hard as you could possibly do. The best of the best in terms of words, I thought, "God, I'm going to be like that." These are my models. I weathered amazing storms. I was literally like they tried to fail my senior writing project when it was high schools because the topic offended people. They threw me out of my undergraduate creative writing program. It took me three years to get into the graduate program I wanted to get into because I was only going one place. I had decided I like tremendous hurdles along the way, 10 years to get my first book published, that kind of stuff, and I just, it never, I wasn't competing with anybody around me. I was competing with the best of the best and so I didn't have, I had totally unrealistic expectations from the beginning and I think that actually helped me immensely. The entire inverse of that is in action and adventure sports, I found that progression comes from not trying to compare myself to anybody. When I, in skiing, the greatest thing I ever did was I stopped comparing myself to anybody and I just started focusing on speed as my metric. We talked about that earlier and that massive because I got out of my own way, I got out of my own head and I sort of think they did the same thing. I think you can get farther, faster. How do you imagine the impossible more is finding grounds for comparison that don't make any logical sense and use them anyways, sort of was helpful to me. But I mean, the other thing is also, I mean, you know, there's a lot to be said in action sports, if you trace this revolution in the beginning, it was literally the availability of the affordable VCR that changed the game. If you want to look at one of the two things that started driving this massive progression, two things did it. One was kind of the birth of the free skiing, free surfing, free riding movement, which freed people from competition and said creativity and innovation is the point, which led to way more flow than I want a better time in this race. That was one thing. The other thing was the availability of affordable VCR because suddenly people could not only see the impossible being done, they could rewind, they could slow things down and they could break it down and it became this amazing performance tool. You talk to Ian Walsh about Jaws, he says the most incredible thing is I get home from a session at Jaws, somebody has already uploaded the footage to the internet and I can immediately begin reviewing my footage from the day, seeing how I did it, improving my performance while I'm eating my dinner. That is huge, huge, huge leverage, massive amounts of feedback and, you know, immediate feedback is another one of these flow triggers, it's one of the psychological triggers. But, you know, the fact that we are now having visual ways to do that in action sports, I think it's driving it. I don't know if any of this is answering your question, but I'm sort of circling around it. No, no, this is phenomenal. I love it and it's brilliant. You know, something you said in there really struck a chord with me, you know, you said that they wanted something else to measure themselves by rather than the most optimal speed time and man, I mean, I think that when you open up yourself to being measured by things other than the metrics that we've determined make, you know, say, you know, you're successful, like even in the world of like online stuff, it's like, hey, my metric is, you know, how many people read what I do. I mean, when you let go of metrics, and of course, you know, I mean, a lot of people will say, well, that's easy to say when, you know, you have a ton of people listening to what you're doing or a ton of people reading your books. But I've noticed it was letting go of that as a measure of my success that led to everything. So I've got two answers. Um, one, let's just go back to this last Olympics, right? The first gold medal in the games, Sage's gold medal in Slope Style Snowboard. You remove the like standard performance metric, right? Do this trick, do this trick, do this trick, do it, you know, that kind of thing. The guy didn't even know what he was going to throw until like three minutes into his run and the last tricky through the one that won it for him, he had never thrown before. That's emphasis on creativity and interpretation, all these amazing, amazing things and, you know, clearly throw massive performance there. The other thing is I just like what happened to me in skiing, because it's the most interesting way I could kind of talk about this. Because I grew up skiing with all these pro athletes, I had this image in my head of what they looked like on skis and I had this image in my head of what I looked like. So literally I would ski down the hill and in my mind, I was thinking trying to see what I looked like from above and judging my performance based on it. And what ended up happening was I hooked up with a, I moved to New Mexico and I hooked up with a group of guys and started skiing with them. And I realized that like nobody cares what I looked like. They can't even see. They're focused on their own stuff. The only thing anybody cares about is, can I get to the bottom as fast as they do so they don't have to wait for me? Literally, I mean, I was like, it's ridiculous, like that's all anybody cares about here. No, we're doing 30 miles an hour through the trees, who the hell is looking at me, right? So I said, I literally, I was like, oh my God, I'm focusing on the wrong thing. My brand is the wrong thing. And of course, I get my head off of this like judgmental ego base. How do I look into am I fast enough so these guys don't have to wait for me? Which is, by the way, kind of an altruistic motive in the sense, which is interesting because we know, for example, that altruism is another thing that triggers flow states. There's an altruism based flow state called helper's high. So maybe even just putting my focus on their feelings a little bit could have helped. But I find it so funny. And what happened is I switched that focus and went from like, it was literally in, it was faster than my fastest progression I've ever seen in anything was what happened to me over the next like month after I switched my focus. I've never seen anything like it. And the funny thing about it is still to this day, if you ask me about skiing, that whole month is so seared into my memory that I get like flashes of everything that happened during that month. Because it was literally like, what I ended up getting to witness is myself doing things that had been impossible for me for 15 years, I've been trying to do stuff and set myself to the hospital. I can't tell you how many times, how many bones I broke along the way. And suddenly my tick list, like things are falling off, my tick list iterated like two or three a day and used to be like one a year, maybe. Wow. Yeah, no, it was really, which is what's, and I think that, by the way, I think that's the coolest thing about all of this, which is flow. The interesting thing about the flow path is you surprise yourself all the time. You come to these points and you're like, oh my God, I don't have any idea how I'm doing that. And one day the gap between you and Ian Walsh seems herculean, and then two weeks later, you look at it and you go, well, it's still huge, but I actually see the path. Maybe I don't have the 10 years to put in, but I see the path and it's really, really strange. And that's the thing about accelerated learning, right? These states are massively accelerated learning. It doesn't, it comes in surprising ways and you find yourself a lot farther faster than you ever thought was possible and you don't really know how you got there. And of course you don't, because what's happening in flow is your subconscious is essentially taking over for your conscious mind, right? That's all that's really happening is your extrinsic system, your conscious mind is shutting down and your intrinsic system is taking over. This is happening for efficiency. Literally the brain is trying to conserve energy. So the intrinsic system is much more energy efficient than the extrinsic system. This just never happens in normal life. So it seems very, very peculiar and this flow is one of the only times you actually get to watch it happen, right? But there's also that, as you know, in flow, it's like you're at some remove, you feel like you're in total control of the experience, yet you don't feel like you're driving the bus. It feels like somebody else is running the show and you know, it's an amazing, wonderful feeling that you can kind of just absorb this energy and do all this stuff with it, but you really don't feel like it has anything to do with you. - Awesome, I love it, I mean this has been absolutely brilliant. So Stephen, I know that you had mentioned to me before we hit record here that for anybody wants to pre-order the book Rise of Superman, there's a bunch of bonuses. So talk to us a little bit about that and then we'll wrap things up. - For sure. So Rise launches on March 4th and between now and March 4th, we are doing a giant kind of pre-sale campaign with really cool rewards, over $100,000 for the prizes, everything from 20% off the book and I think the book, it's 20% off of the Amazon's already really low price. So I think you can get it for $14 at this point, but it comes with, you know, a free download of one of our movies on, it's got five of the world's best athletes talking about how flow helps them in human performance, it's got a free flow diagnostic, which is a diagnostic tool anybody can use and take and it really helps them drill down into what things in their life produce the most flow and where they should seek it most, all the way up to kind of live events, Google Hangouts on, we've got a Google Hangout on flow and high performance that is myself, Mike Jubei, the performance psychologist for the CLSC Hawks, Jamie Wills, the executive director of the Flow Genome Project and world champion kiteboarder Susie Mai. It's really cool stuff people can come and participate in and, yeah, so that's all going on and you can find that all in RisesSuperman.com. Awesome. Well, Stephen, I'm going to ask you my last question, you know, it's funny, our show is called The Unmistakable Creative, so I am going to ask you something that, you know, I'm trying to ask different questions and this was one, finally I decided to close with. In a world of so much noise, how do you become unmistakable? Think you figure out what's really, really important to you and stop doing anything else. I think it all follows from all follows from there. You just cut out the noise. There's too much. I think you just shut it down and said these are the four or five core things that are me and this is what I'm going to devote my life to. I love that. I love it because it's so simple and nobody has ever simplified it that way before, for me. Well, Stephen, as I expected, this has been really, really phenomenal. I've learned so much talking to you. It's just been one of my favorite conversations I've had on the show, so I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share some of your insights with our listeners here at Unmistakable Creative. For me, it was my pleasure, it was super fun, thanks for having me. And for those of you guys listening, we'll wrap the show with that. Today's episode of The Unmistakable Creative has been brought to you by Sells. That's S-E-L-Z dot com. Sells gives you the freedom to sell from any website quickly with no programming, no special templates or special themes needed, while giving your customer a completely seamless experience. Thanks for listening in on another candid conversation at The Unmistakable Creative. Embrace your inner misfit, express your creative voice, and remember, the goal isn't to live forever, but to create something that will. Let's talk about something that's not always top of mind, but still really important. Life Insurance Why? 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A Look at the early days of journalism, writing, and a creative career
Dealing with suicidal depression and lyme disease
The altered states of consciousness that led to healing
Why writing is about exploiting your curiosity
How hitting rock bottom can often open a world of opportunities
Understanding the definition of flow
What happens to a person when they are in a state of flow
Lessons learned about flow from the world of extreme sports
The role that risk plays in your ability to get into a flow state
Learning how to train the process of deep embodiment
Finding the midpoint between boredom and anxiety
How flow states significantly cuts the path to mastery
The distinction between overachievers and underachievers
Why guilt and vanity are horrible drivers of success
The 3 things that you put together to create flow states
Why You Can't Use the Mind to Get Away from the Mind
Looking at the role your upbringing plays in your talent
What happens you see the impossible done at a really early age
The importance of training your ability to commit to your goal
Learning how to cultivate your ability to imagine the impossible
Finding new metrics which allow you to measure yourself

Resources and People Mentioned

The Rise of Superman

Alex Jamieson on the Making of Super Size Me

A Look at the early days of journalism, writing, and a creative career
Dealing with suicidal depression and lyme disease
The altered states of consciousness that led to healing
Why writing is about exploiting your curiosity
How hitting rock bottom can often open a world of opportunities
Understanding the definition of flow
What happens to a person when they are in a state of flow
Lessons learned about flow from the world of...
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