Achieving 500% Productivity Through Flow States

Flow follows focus. It only shows up when all our attention is the right here, right now.
So that's what all the triggers do. They drive our attention into the present moment.
If I wanted to get into the neuroscience, they do it a bunch of different ways. Some of them push dopamine to our system.
Some push norepinephrine to our system. Some of them lower cognitive load.
Cogative load is just all the crap you're trying to think about at any one time. And if I lower cognitive load, this is why people will tell you, clean your office, right? If you're totally distracted and you're all over the place, what do I do first? You clean your office.
Why would you possibly clean your office? It lowers cognitive load. All the crap you're trying to think about starts to go away.
And what happens? You liberate some extra energy. What does the brain do with that extra energy? It repurposes it for focus and attention.
So complete concentration is the first flow trigger, the most important. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business.
Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you.
First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview.
So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES to 888-526-1299.
That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode.
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Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview.

Welcome back to the home service expert.

Today is an amazing day.

It's a Sunday.

And you guys know Joe Polish and I are great friends.

I'm part of the hundred K group.

He is probably the best networker on the planet.

I've never seen anybody even come close and his great friend,

Steven Collar here.

I got to know Steven Collar at the last meeting.

It was probably like six months ago. Yeah, about a and uh steven's wrote i don't like not one not two but probably a dozen 14 books 14 books he's the expert of flow i mean there's like he is the world-renowned expert and this idea of flow is what athletes do it's what doctors do it's what businessmen do.
It's what everybody does when they get in this 500% better results. And we talked a lot.
We're going to talk about goal setting. One of the biggest things you talk about a lot is just the neural connections and some of these ideas of these different ways to get into flow.
And now there's the neurotransmitters, the dopamine release, the Burning Man festivals, and just all these different ideas. So we're going to jump into this.
I don't think this is going to be a foo-foo-rah-rah podcast. This is really good about performance and about being your best self.
So Joe's here. What's your biggest takeaway? I mean, you've known Kotler for a long time.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Gosh, we first met around 2010.
I've had quite a few interviews with him. Smart dude.
He's very science-based and he's very much, he'll call out what he thinks are charlatans and bullshit. And he always looks back at like, how do we know this actually works? And Mahaley, Chick sent me high, who wrote the original Flow, the Psychology of Achievement and many other great books.
Stephen's actually the one that taught me how to actually pronounce his last name. Chick set me high, right? So Mihaly and he was personally- Yeah, Tommy, ask me how I learned to pronounce it the hard way.
Because I learned the hard way too. And I'll just say this.
So, you know, I found a genius at work and I have Genius Recovery, which is an addiction recovery foundation. And I won't go into this unless you guys decide to go down that road.
I think of Flow, you know, there's that Johan Hari line, which is the opposite of addiction is connection. And so if you take the opposite of the ultimate form of connection is flow is to being in a state where you just it's blissful.
You're connected. You feel good.
It could be, you know, psychological. It could be physical.
It's all those things that coalesce in this great area where you're just you're just on. You're dialed in.
Now, the opposite of that is complete angst and stress and desperation. And you look at addiction.
So I look at flow not only just in performance and life for entrepreneurs and business owners like the home service experts that are listening to this, people that want to get in better physical shape. I also look at it in terms of if you're not in a state, can't get to a state of flow and connectedness, you could be very, have a very self-destructive life.
You could be lonely, depressed. You could just feel horrible.
And so Stephen can speak to all of that. And I'm really just kind of here to, I'll just interrupt.
Yeah, no, moral support. I think, Stephen, I read that you, and I know this about you, you got Lyme disease.
You were out for a while, a couple of years, really brain fog. And then a friend of yours came by and said, I want to go take you surfing.
And you can tell us about that story and tell us a little bit about you and just. So it's worth backing it up one step because it's irrelevant.
So I out of college trained as a poet so i came out of college with an absolutely worthless degree but uh i became a journalist in journalism they sort of pay you to be curious and i was really geeked on on neuroscience because i like i think like a lot of us i wasn't born with an instruction manual i wasn't a super talented kid kid. There were better athletes.
These people were funnier. These people were smarter.
I had big dreams and I grew up in Cleveland in a steel mill town, basically at a time it was a steel mill town. And I didn't have an operating manual.
I wanted an instruction manual. I was really pissed that I wasn't born with an instruction manual.
And I figured out very quickly that neuroscience was that instruction manual. And that sounds really strange if you're not geeked on neuroscience, but it's the difference between psychology and neuroscience is about precision.
Psychology is squishy. It's subjective.
People figure out, oh, this is the model and it sort of relates to who I am. So I'm going to train you with it.
And it usually doesn't work and it doesn't help. Neuroscience is precise because it's shared by everybody, right? Evolution shaped all of us.
So the way my brain works and the way your brain works and the way your brain works, it's very, very similar. So if you can get down to the level of neurobiology, suddenly you're dealing with mechanism.
Suddenly you're dealing with something that works like an engine rather than like this amorphous car in the sky. And that was really useful for me.
And I was covering action sports, surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding, and the like. And this is the part that matters.
At the time, I was living in what was then Squaw Valley, what's now Palisades Tahoe. And I'm an old punk rocker.
And Squaw Valley was like the punk rock mecca of the action sports world. When it was back, this is before it was a world.

It wasn't an industry.

It wasn't anything.

It was a bunch of basically skate punks and ski punks and surf punks and whatnot.

And the 90s in performance and action sports is often talked about as the era of impossible.

More things that had never been done got done in that era than ever before, right?

And if you knew anything about performance back in the 90s, it was all about like, you

better have a lot of money.

Thank you. got done in that era than ever before, right? And if you knew anything about performance back in the 90s, it was all about like, you better have a lot of money.
You better have the right coaches. You better go to the right schools.
You better have the right parents so you have the right genetics. It was all this stuff that you couldn't control.
And I'm living in this community with people who are routinely, not just setting world records, they're doing things that for all of our core history, we thought was going to kill people that you couldn't do. And I always say, it's like one thing when you see like Laird Hamilton surfing a big wave on a screen.
And it's one thing when you go out drinking with your buddies on a Friday night, everybody's hungover, you wake up Saturday morning and go into the mountains together and they do something that for all of recorded history has never been done. It sort of catches your attention.
And what really caught my attention was everybody I knew, they didn't have any money.

They were like broken homes, blue collar, very little education.

There was a lot of substance abuse in those communities, a lot of high-risk behavior.

Normally, you put those things together in a community, you know what happens.

People die younger, they go to jail.

What they don't do is reinvent what's going on for the human species, what's possible.

That's what I was seeing on almost like a weekly basis.

So the question was, what the hell is going on? Where is this coming from? And if you started talking to people about it, nobody had that word flow back then, right? It was in psychology, but we'd talk a little about being in the zone, but you couldn't really, hey, my sense of self disappeared and time passes. You couldn couldn't talk about that stuff out loud back in the nineties.
People really thought you were crazy. But if you talk to these action sport athletes, that's what was happening.
So in that milieu, out of that milieu, I got Lyme disease and I spent three years in bed and was going to end my life. I like the doctors had pulled me off medicine.
My stomach lining was bleeding out. There was nothing anybody could do for me.
I was so- What year was this? I got it when I was 30. So it was 1999 is when I got it.
And I was sick to like 2002. I was basically in bed for three years.
Brain fog was terrible. I couldn't think.
I could function like 10 minutes a day. So I had 10 minutes a day when I was clear-headed.
The first time I laid on a couch, I could watch basketball, but I couldn't even watch basketball because I had no memory left. So I couldn't watch the Lakers.
Anybody playing a half court style was too slow. The Clippers that year were playing that like Antonio seven second offense where they'd run up and score back.
It's the only thing I could follow on television because it was the only thing that was making any sense. And a friend shows up at my house.
I'm literally ready to kill myself. She says, let's go surfing.
My response was, fuck you. You're out of your mind.
You're crazy. I can't walk across my room.
I can't go surfing. You're out of your mind.
And she wouldn't leave my house after like four hours. I was like, fine.
Let's just go surfing. At least like, what's the worst that can happen? And they had to carry me to the car.
They gave me a board the size of a catwalk. They had to brought me to the wimpiest beginner wave in Los Angeles.
And I was out there maybe 30 seconds. They walked me out to the break, put me on this big board and I'm just bobbing in the waves and a wave came.
And I hadn't surfed in like five years, but I popped up. It was just like muscle memory.
I just spun my board around and popped up. Probably all the energy I had in the world left, period, was to pop to my feet.
But I popped up into a dimension that I didn't even know existed. I've had flow states experience, but I had never had it.
It's known as macro flow, like a full-blown macro flow experience. I had an out-of-body experience at the time.
I lifted out of my body to watch myself surfing. We now know why all those things happened.

But at the time, I was like, what the hell is going on? But I felt great. It was the first time in three years I actually felt alive.
I was happy or at least functional. And it felt so good.
I caught like four more waves that day. By the fifth wave, I was done.
They brought me home. They put me in bed.
People brought me food for like two weeks because I couldn't even get out of my bed to make it in my kitchen. And on the 14th day, I had a neighbor who was a pro surfer or semi-pro surfer and I knocked on his door.
He didn't even know him. Knocked on

his door. He was like, hey, I'm your neighbor.
I think you need to take me to the ocean because

I got to go surfing again. And that was all I did over the course of about six months.

I was surfing and having these, I didn't even know they were actually flow states because flow was this sort of smaller thing. I was having this crazy experience.
I didn't know what it was, but my health was getting better. And I like, still, I'm just like lying on the couch in between surf sessions, but it started out at 14 days and then it was 10 days and it was eight days and it was six days.
And slowly my health is improving. And like surfing is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions.
So what the hell is going on? And I really thought I was, even though I was feeling better, I thought I was actually dying because the Lyme had gotten into my brain. I didn't realize these out-of-body experiences, these things that I was having, experiencing the waves were actually sort of common in deep flow states.
And there was biology in them. I thought I was losing my mind.
I thought the disease had gotten into my brain and it was just eating my brain and that's what was happening so i lit out on a giant quest like what the hell is going on with me and i very quickly discovered that the same state of consciousness flow that had helped these you know the folks in the action sports world go from zero up to superman was helping me go from like seriously subpar back to normal and And it was the same thing on either side of the equation. Joe's right.
If you go into a lot of treatment centers, I'm not talking about core, not the industry around treatment, but actually people are doing really good work. They're built around flow programs.
We now know that flow can overwrite addiction, overwrite PTSD, overwrite burnout. It can do fights against depression and anxiety and bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
It's the only static thing in the world that will treat all those conditions at once because it's optimal performance. We're all hardwired for it.
I didn't know any of that. And I didn't know that flow massively improves the immune system and can reset your nervous system.
So we now know why flow cures Lyme disease and is used for autoimmune conditions and addiction and all this stuff. But we didn't back in the 90s.
I was just trying to figure out, am I dying? And if I'm not dying, am I crazy? And if I'm not dying and I'm not crazy, what the hell is going on? And can I get more of this? How does it work? Can my friends get more of this? Can we control this? Can we learn from this? What is this? And the 90s was really cool because not only did the neuroscience start getting laid down, but flow in the beginning when we started in the 60s, it was just like, how do we define it? Oh, we define it as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. Then it expanded from that.
Oh, flow refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. It's so focused on what you're doing.
Everything else just starts to melt away and disappear. Sense of self goes away.
Time passes strangely. You know, the common experience is you just get so sucked into what you're doing, right? Five hours go by.
It feels like five seconds. And all aspects of performance, physical, mental, and emotional go through the roof.
Now, back in the early days, all the work had been done on athletes. So we sort of knew, okay, fast twitch muscle response increases in flow, strength increases in flow, stamina increases in flow.
We didn't know how those things worked or why those things happened. We just knew that they were happening.
And then Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and myself also, both of us, not only were we interested in sports, we were also creatives. I was a writer.
He was a writer. And a lot of our friends were artists or whatever.
And we started to realize, oh, artists, we were doing this in our art, too. It's getting into these low-grade flow states while I was writing.
And when I was in a low-grade flow state, as you just pointed out, productivity goes through the roof. The number you gave that 500% above baseline, McKinsey, the business consultancy that went around the globe, they talked to leaders, like CEOs of major companies for 10 years.
And they said, how much more productive are you in flow? You always got to take it with a great assault because it's like a self-reported thing, right? They were asking questions. We've studied it at more length and gotten better numbers, but it's still pretty accurate.
The average was 500% more productive. You've got to put that in context.
That means you go to work on Monday. It's been Monday in a flow state.
You can take Tuesday through Friday off, and you're going to get as much done as everybody else in the company out of flow in one day that takes them five days to get done. That's what was happening in my writing.
Something I would sit down to write write and I'd produce a whole chapter where before I would produce a tiny little paragraph. And I

was like, okay, this is kind of amazing. Like productivity is going through the roof and

other things followed. We now started to figure out, okay, it's not just physical,

it's cognitive. And now we know it's emotional.
So when we talk about optimal performance,

it optimizes physically, mentally, and emotionally. All three of them are lifted as high as they can go in humans.
This is literally us performing at our very best. Because it's neurobiologically based, we're all hardwired for it.
So everybody listening to this podcast can get into flow for free. This is like, you know, biohackers are what, spending $2,000 a month on supplements and blah, blah, blah.
No, no, no. This is hardwired into everybody.
It's yours. For free, just feel free.
This is like, you know, biohackers are what, spending $2,000 a month on supplements and blah, blah, blah. No, no, no.
This is hardwired into everybody. It's yours for free.
Just figure out how it works and you can get more of it. Get as much as you want.
It's untapped. You can't live in a flow state because it's a cycle, right? We used to think it was a binary, like a light switch.
You're in the zone, you're out of the zone. It doesn't actually work that way.
Most things in the body are a cycle. You've got these four stages.
You've got to move through all those stages to get back into flow. What we've discovered is what used to be this rare experience for people, we found our training, we have an eight-week digital training, Zero to Dangerous, a standard flow training.
We measure everything. The last 1 thousand people who went through the training, we saw a 73.82% increase in flow for the last thousand people.
That's pretty average. We see 70, 80% increase in flow for most people.
I'd love to tell you that's my Kung Fu, that we're that good and we're good. That's biology.
That's all of us. Once you start figuring out how this shit works, you can do that yourself.
It's really amazing. I want to say something to that too, just for context purposes.
So it was years before Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was writing about the flow state, but no one quite figured out how to actually get there. And I think that's what your work has been.
Yeah, that's most of my work has been. And, you know, what's interesting is like Stephen's books, he's written a lot of like Peter Diamandis' books, which New York Times bestsellers was written with Stephen, right? And you probably did more writing than Peter.
We share. Let's not throw Peter under the bus.
Peter's a friend of mine. So, but the thing is, is like, so for everyone listening, you're an entrepreneur.
I think the 500% productivity is incredible. There's also the group flow because almost everyone listening to this has a team of people.
So it's not just an individual thing, right? So how do you do this? How do you enroll and engage other people so you can get your company? I think that's what Tommy's done a really great job with. You know, Unstoppable 365, you know, it's bringing people into all of these, not just mental, but physical stuff.
Because in his latest, Stephen's latest book is called a Gnar country, G N A R getting old, staying rad, you know, cause he's pretty much like a punk rocker. And I never, I not.
And I was born in like the 1840s. I'm old and I'm an old punk rocker.
We're about the same age. So what's funny is that he's been nominated three times for a Pulitzer prize.
Haven't won yet. So you're like, loser.
I'm the biggest loser in the history of the Pulitzer. Yes, I am.
You're an amazing writer and you do incredible research and whatnot. And so the point I want to make with all of that is that this isn't just performance.
This is how you mentally feel. Yeah, this is worth hammering on because it's so critical.
So we've known since the 60s. This is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work, but it's now baked into psychology and positive psychology.
So we knew that flow underpinned happiness and well-being. We now know it underpins life satisfaction, meaning, purpose.
In fact, when positive psychologists define happiness, there are three tiers. The upper two tiers, the best you get to feel on the planet, have flow baked into the definition.

That was where we were for a really long time.

And I worked on this recently.

The point I made a minute ago, we started to figure out the opposite.

It's hard to prove flow helps with depression or anxiety.

Those are trickier because you need specific kinds of studies.

And this brilliant team in Europe just to publish a study in Nature and in one of the Nature publications, 10,000 twins. So if you're going to study depression or anxiety or any of these conditions, twin studies are the gold standard, right? You got identical twins, they're separated at birth.
What happens to one? What happens to the other? It's like the nature versus nature. Yeah.
It gives you just the best sort of benchmark. And they took a 10,000-person twin sample.
This is where they discovered flow is protective against depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and cardiac-related stress conditions. So for all of us getting older, cardiac-related stress conditions as well.
And then my lab proved that flow overrides PTSD. And my friend Karina Pfeiffer proved that flow overwrites burnout.
And so right now, the whole world seems to be suffering from burnout. And this is the only, there's no pill, there's no protocol in the world that treats all those conditions.
Literally, there's nothing else you can get that will protect against those conditions and massively increase happiness and well-being and overall life satisfaction. Would the word antidote be appropriate for that? Is it the antidote to burnout or is that? I think so.
I'm not going to say it's the antidote to depression or anxiety. Those are bigger things, but it may be the antidote to burnout.
Certainly, here's the crazy thing. This is worth knowing.
So back in the 60s, the book that introduced flow to the world was a book by Csikszentmihalyi known as Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. And he ran this really weird study where, so there's macro flow.
That's what happened to me when I went surfing, right? This is full-blown flow state, time passes strangely, self-disappears, you start on one with the ocean, all that stuff. And I can talk about the science of that if anybody cares.
But micro flow is what happens at work, right? You go to work. Let's say you work in an office.
You sit down and write a quickie email to your colleague. It's supposed to be a paragraph long, take two minutes.
But you get so sucked into what you're doing. An hour goes by and you look up and you've written a whole essay and it's great.
You're like, what happened to the time? That's microflow. Microflow is really common at work.
Most of us spend about 5% to 10% of our work lives in microflow, even without noticing. So Csikszentmihalyi found a way to block microflow in people back in the 60s.
He did this experiment. Only man, he blocked it for three days.
And then he recorded what happened to people. Look, what happened to people in three days blocking microflow.
It's like extreme burnout. They go from normal, well-adjusted, happy to deeply paranoid.
I can't think I'm suspicious. I'm anxious.
I can't focus. I'm miserable, et cetera, et cetera.
Here's the thing. Modern business is designed to block microflow.
The entire way we do business these days blocks microflow.

The way almost every company is organized, 11 different channels of communication coming in.

You've got Slack.

You've got email.

You've got all this stuff pulling your attention out of the present moment.

You're blocking microflow.

You're literally creating conditions for yourself and your employees that are going to drive everybody into burnout almost immediately. Hi, welcome to your new job.
Have some burnout. That's literally what we're doing to people in our companies most of the time.
There are a company, Toyota doesn't do it. Patagonia doesn't do it.
The best companies in the world, you look at what they're doing, you look at their management philosophies. They got pro flow management philosophies and they found a way to go against that.
But most companies have no idea. They think all this technology is making them more efficient, and it's making them miserable and less efficient.
Can I ask you a question? Because I've sat through Tommy's team meetings, and they're very engaged. One of the most engaged groups that I've seen in service business, which is why I think he's such a great spokesperson for home service and, home service and whatnot.
I think it's because he can lift a car. That's just me.
So I'm sure, you know, I can't speak for Tommy. I'm sure there's stages where he's like really motivated, you know, he's really engaged in the culture.
So I look at it in engagement. What's the difference between an engaged culture and flow? What is the similarities? So here's the other thing that's really also interesting.
Just let's go back to culture because we were talking last night when the three of us were together about the importance of culture in organizations. Flow is a culture building engine.
That's one of the things. So here's something that's really interesting.
You hear a lot of stuff these days about, oh, I want psychological safety in my workplace. or we're going to be an inclusive workplace, right? And first of all, first question, how the fuck are you measuring that? Because it's fine to say it out loud.
Who doesn't want psychological safety in an inclusive workplace? We all do. But how are you measuring it? And most people are trying to measure it.
They end up breaking their companies because everybody's got their personal little things and that's what comes up, right? Psychological safety and inclusion becomes code for, oh no, anything that personally is bothering me, I can now call it, I'm unsafe or I don't feel included. And suddenly the company's screwed.
So you want to really, yes, we want these things. How are you measuring them? Here's something cool.
You can actually measure flow because you can't produce flow for reasons we can get into without psychological safety or inclusion. If you're working in an organization and you don't feel safe or included, you can't get into flow.
So you can literally measure flow in your employees as a way to find out, oh, do they feel safe? Oh, do they feel like, is this my workplace without having to get into discussions about political correctness versus non-political, like all this stuff that really is sort of, I think, poisonous to most businesses these days and are really dragging up businesses and education, a lot of stuff. And it's not that the intentions are bad.
I think the intentions are great. I think the way it's being operationalized is a disaster.
And the better way to operationalize it is to actually track for flow because you get those other things baked in. By the way, we just talked for an hour.
No, it's barely any time. This idea of flow starts with struggle.
And I just, I don't know what burnout and maybe I just never experienced burnout, but I've always seen the vision.

I think my job is to maintain a vivid vision and help people.

I'm the dumbest guy in the room.

I thought I was the dumbest guy.

I'm always the dumbest guy.

I'm the dumbest guy in this room.

We bring in the best of the best and we let them do their work,

but I don't know not,

not how to hit the gas.

And I could see that I could burn out people really,

really quickly,

but I don't even understand what burnout is. So let me define it in the terms you just, so this is, and maybe this hasn't happened to you, which is amazing.
When your dreams become your own prison, when you build it, that's what happens to a lot of entrepreneurs, right? They're tracking on the vision. They're growing it.
They're growing it. They're growing it.
They're growing it. They get to where they want to go.
And they're like, oh, shit, I built a cage out of my dreams.

Gino Wickman talked about this with me. Yeah.
Gino Wickman. He just said, hey, I got to the top of the mountain, sold 87 and a half percent of EOS.
Super successful. Changed the world the way we think about business.
And I was depressed like nobody's business. I had hit every pinnacle that I've set out to get.

And I was, I felt useless.

I felt like I gave up my baby. I felt I had all the money in the world.
And I think a lot of people feel that way either when they sell or they're growing something and they hit these goals, but it comes at a price. Well, the other thing you said, and this is worth asking about, you've always, I've always had a vision.
All right,. My attention always is going, okay, I've learned this.
Where can I go next? What's the next hard challenge? What's the next hard challenge? If you don't have those, if you don't have a new North Star, if you build a company and get suddenly achieved everything you want to do without another vision to anchor yourself, we're goal-directed machines. Humans are goal-directed machines.
What the science tells us, like you look at my book, The Art of Impossible, which tracks this, we function best with three tiers of goals. You need daily to-do lists, clear goals in flow

terminology, and they're set in a very specific way. You need high-hard goals.
These are multi-year

goals, three to five-year goals. Then you need mission statement goals for your life.
You want

them all pointing in the same direction. What you're doing today is feeding into your high-hard

I'm sorry. multi-year goals, three to five-year goals.
And then you need mission statement goals for your life, right? And you want them all pointing in the same direction. So like what you're doing today is feeding into your high-to-art goals, which is feeding into your mission goals, which is what Peter and I called a massively transformative purpose, right? Back when we were writing bold, credit where credit is due.
Salim is male's term. We stole it from Salim.
But a massively transformative purpose is your anchor and everything sort of fills to that. And if you've, if you're massively transformed purpose, you've suddenly achieved it, right? And you haven't said another one or extended it out.
That also derails a lot of people. That sounds like what you were talking about.
You know, it's interesting, like with framing, because the way I'm sitting there thinking about who would be watching or listening to this. And when you had Lyme disease, let's just say for simplicity sake sake, I know it's way more involved and complicated than I'm going to try to simplify it, is you're off track.
Your body's not working. Nothing was working.
My brain, my body, my career, my marriage, I was bankrupt, bankrupted myself. I mean, I screwed myself, but good.
So you're way off track, right? And then surfing. And the mechanism of engaging in flow brings healing to you.
It brings all this shit to you, right? And that's when you first started like figuring out what the hell is happening here and you immerse yourself in now being the world expert in this area. So the question is, Tommy's had areas of his life, you know, as a drug addict, right? Like I was mired in addiction.
I've been in recovery for 20 plus years. So when you're off track, flow and knowing how to get there and what we're talking about today to get you on track is what's so critically important.
I think Tommy, he's going to hold a big event this week. A bunch of people that are off track.
Some are on track. They just want to be going faster.
We want to do them better. And so the whole purpose of this conversation is like, how do we help people get on track? How do you purposefully get yourself to the best part of that track? How do you bring your team along on that track? And that has to do with zero to dangerous, like understanding what that even means.
What goes on in that process? Well, this is again, where the neuroscience is so useful because, and I'm sure probably 50, 60, 70% of the people who listen to your podcast are interested in some level of self-improvement, fixing their lives, fixing their career. I think most people.
Yeah, you got to listen to this. If your experience was anything like mine, if you don't come in armed with the neuroscience and blah, blah, blah, and we'll come back to that in a second, what the fuck do you do first, right? Do I care about goal setting? Is this about connection? Is this about motivation? Like, where do I start? Is this about flow? This guy's talking about flow.
Is that where I... It turns out, if you follow the biology, there's a map.
There's literally a map. We know where you start.
We know what you do. We know what order it goes in.
It always has to start with motivation. We learned this way back in the day.
Abraham Maslow pointed it out, but it's been proven again and again. First of all, you can't pay your bills on that.
You are rent insecure, food insecure, any of those things. Solve that problem first because until you don't need a lot of money.
You need to just, they've proven like after $70,000. Well, but that number is literally for a family, right? It's basic needs plus a little leftover for discretionary income.
That's all you need. But if you don't have that- The basic necessities.
There's too much fear. So fear- Maslow's hierarchy.
Norepinephrine, all that stuff that produces fear, cortisol, it blocks peak performance. It blocks everything else.
So you have to start with extrinsic motivation. You got to start by paying your bills, right? Once that happens, the next thing you want is intrinsic motivation.
Big drivers to drive you forward so you can get in the game. And what are the biggest drivers? Autonomy, mastery, purpose, passion, and curiosity.
And there's an order. Curiosity is designed to be built into passion, which is designed to be built into purpose.
And once you have your purpose, what do you want? Autonomy. You want the freedom to pursue your purpose.
Once you have your autonomy, what do you need? Mastery, the skills to pursue that purpose well. That's how the biology works.
Once you're there, time to layer in the three tiers of goal setting. And once you're there, now it's time to talk flow, right? That's great.
Like we know this, you know, everybody's selling a different piece in this puzzle.

So you're getting all these different messages, but neurobiology really laid out the map.

It was like, okay, start here, go here, go here.

It's a check.

I said, we may argue over this,

but I'm the dumbest guy in the room.

I need a checklist.

What am I doing first?

What am I doing second?

What am I doing third?

Everyone needs a checklist.

When I go on stages, they're like, where do I even get started? Like literally, I try to give the best information possible, but I actually sink people to the bottom of the ocean because I've been doing this. I'm an overnight success of two decades.
Right, me too. And it's hard to go back to the beginning of sub a million dollars.
So when I talk about brand and I talk about the worst word in the English dictionary when I started business was culture. I'm like, I got people stealing from me.
I got a guy that flipped over a truck. I got the cops here.
I got people not answering the phones, sitting on Facebook. And you're talking to me about culture.
And now I'm like, you can't live without it. But this stress and anxiety, I get stress and anxiety, but I make decisions and I rip off the band-aids really, really quickly.
The best state I get in is put me between a rock and a hard spot. Put the world on my shoulders.
It's weird. It's like, put me in an impossible situation.
And then that's when I perform my best. Well, let me speak to that then, because in our country, he literally shows that if you're injured, getting yourself in flow in order to overcome a back pain that's going to take place because of how much neurochemically is happening in a flow state.
When you guys are talking, I write down here, I wrote flow killers because I want to hear your perspective on flow killers in the area of relationships, money, which he spoke to physical, spiritual, emotional, the environment. If you're in like some toxic environment, you know, you may intellectually understand it, but you know, and then foundational sleep, water, basic needs, and then fear.
Like he said, a challenging situation. Well, Tommy is dancing with fear in a different way where it is somehow empowering him.
Whereas other people it's disabling them and then get in the game. You said, get in the game.
And I'm like, okay, so how do you design that game? And what are the killers that are going to keep that? So that's just all the stuff that's going through my head before you get to the three tiers of goal setting, right? So it's like, yeah. So with Tommy, and we can talk about why again, but I've seen this again and again and again, right? My career started as a journalist, then moved into writing books.
And now I still do those things, not a lot of journalism, but now I do the science. It's just gotten me sort of more granular over the time.
But what I've really done is in every domain, I've tried to be in the room when the impossible becomes possible, right? Like when somebody does something, whether it's turn on the very first artificial vision implant, the very first time blind person could see, how did you do that? Where did it come from to like Peter when he founded the X-Presence at the first private spaceship? How did you do that? That was always my question. You pulled off the impossible.
How did it happen? Flow is always part of the answer. There's a bunch more of the answer, which is why Art in the Impossible is a bigger book than just about flow.
But one of the things that I found about the top performers across the boards is they use fear as a compass. And the reason is this, we are limited energetically and the most expensive thing for the brain to do.
Brain takes all your energy, right? It's 2% of your body weight it uses at rest. So you're not even working, you're just chilling.
25% of your energy goes to your brain. So the brain is always trying to be energy efficient.
It's the first order of business. But for people who are trying to increase their performance, if you can learn to work with fear, fear is awesome as a motivator because it gives you focus for free.
You don't have to struggle to pay attention to stuff that you're scared of. You can't not stop paying attention.
So once you get good at this and once you can go, oh, yeah, this is scary, but this

also brings out the best in me and it focused my attention, does a lot of stuff.

The best of the best, always they use fear as a compass.

Oftentimes, so people will see my books and they'll be like, you know, you'll get that

there was a communication challenge, right?

I wanted to communicate a bunch of ideas and that's what they think the book is about. And that's fine.
That's what you see. What I see in every one of my books was this impossible writing challenge that I set for myself.
It's like, okay, you don't know how to do this at all, but to pull this book off, you have to learn how to write like this and this and this and this and this. And they're incredibly scary, hard goals.
The reason I like them is every morning when I have to face a blank page, they're scary. So I'm paying a little more attention for free.
I'm not having to work so hard. So there's a lot of issues with fear.
You got to know how to control your nervous system. You got to manicure your nervous system.
We can talk more about why that is in terms of flow terms, but like the best of the best, we all use fear as a motivator, I think, for the exact reasons you talked about. It brings out the best in people.
You talk a lot about the totemy and a lot of people don't even know how to turn off. They don't know how to take time.
And this is something, you know, Dan Martell, I've talked to a lot about is like, I didn't really ever reflect or take time for myself. And that's, what's kind of my superpower now is like, I go on these long, long walks and I could reflect and I can say, think through things.
And I just think so many people, they don't realize there's 168 hours in a week. You spend 50 sleeping, 50 working, you got to work on yourself.
You talk a lot about readers, you got to be reading and learning and curiosity. You spent 10 working out, you still got 60 hours left.
So a lot of people say, I don't have the time. And they get boggled down and distracted.
And ADHD is a real thing, especially for a business owner. I guess, how do you find the time to get into flow? And what are the actions? If you had to build a step-by-step guide, and we could go into the three tiers of goal setting too, but if you had to set a guide to kind of go into this state more often and get your team into the state.
The environment matters, like what you're doing. So the answer is going to be a little bit different depending on what the situation is, but let's just back it up one step and talk high level.
So you want more flow in your life? Flow states have triggers. These are preconditions that lead to more flow.
This is your toolbox. There's 28 known flow triggers.
There's probably way more, but that's what's been discovered. And as Joe pointed out, there's two varieties of flows.
Individual flow, me in a flow state or Tommy in a flow state. And there's group flow, all three of us, right? We're in a little bit of group flow right now, right? The conversations, our focus is right here.
The conversations bounce around. We're sort of finishing each other's sentences and popping in.
A little group flow experience. So there's 16 triggers for group flow.
The rest are for individual flows. So let's stay on the individual side.
All the triggers do the same thing. Flow follows focus.
It only shows up when all our attention is the right here, right now. So that's what all the triggers do.
They drive our attention into the present moment. If I wanted to get into the neuroscience, they do it a bunch of different ways.
Some of them push dopamine to our system. Some push norepinephrine to our system.
Some of them lower cognitive load. Cogative load is just all the crap you're trying to think about at any one time.
And if I lower cognitive load, this is why people will tell you, clean your office, right? If when you're totally distracted and you're all over the place, what do I do first? You clean your office. Why would you possibly clean your office? It lowers cognitive load.
All the crap you're trying to think about starts to go away. And what happens? You liberate some extra energy.
What does the brain do with that extra energy? It repurposes it for focus and attention. So complete concentration is the first flow trigger, the most important.
So if you're interested in complete concentration on the task at hand, right? If it's a group setting, you want your entire team focused on the same thing. If it's an individual, you want all your attention here.
So what does that mean? You asked about flow killers. The first step is distraction management, right? I start my day with my hardest task.
I want to get the biggest, hardest, most complicated thing out of the way first. One, because I'm going to have the most energy when I wake up, right? I know that.
So that's where I go for me. You're telling me you start your day.
I am telling you. With the very hardest thing you need to do right when you get out of bed? I am telling you why.
I go from my bed to my desk in less than seven minutes. I bed, bathroom.
I put my dogs outside and let them go run around. And I walk over to my office.
I have big properties of my house. My office is on my property or from my house.
Walk over to my office, go on the coffee maker, and I'm down at the computer and I don't. So I, not only do I practice distraction management, I make my to-do list the night before.
So I know exactly where I'm starting. I shut everything down in my office.
There's no email. There's no phone.
Slack is off. All the things that my staff can reach me on, all those things are turned off.
There's no communication channel open except for messages. And that's literally kept open for my wife and my business partner and my parents and a couple other people.
Other than that, I won't check anything. That's first distraction management.
So I've wall off. In fact, I turn all my lights off in my office and I put my writing the night before in FocusView, which is a Microsoft Word thing where all you see is the words.
Literally, I walk into a black room where my book is floating in front of me. The only difference, Tommy, is the hardest thing I have to do is actually create new words, right? I have to advance my chapter, a thousand words or 2000 words or whatever.
I start by editing what I wrote the day before. And there are flow-based reasons for it.
And I can talk about that in a second. But I start by editing and then I go into the hardest thing.
So I guess I start my day with my second hardest task, which is editing what I wrote the day before. And then I go into writing.
And I will tell you, like, if you're good at this and I'm good at this, 95% of the time, I'm on a flow state within like 15 minutes. I usually write for four hours in the morning.
I started four o'clock in the morning and at eight o'clock I stop and I'll usually take my dogs for a hike in the back country at that point. I'm a big believer in long walks too.
And I like, so I like to go out for like an hour right after I've ridden for a bunch of reasons that we can talk about. This has been my life since I was 28 years old every day.
So I've read a lot about like Jeff Bezos, for example, he does his morning routines. He's got to have his cup of coffee, read the wall street journal.
He has a few things go on in the morning. His most important meeting is between 10 and 12.
So do you think, like for me, I got a cold plunge, go in the sauna, wake up. I think everybody's different.
I think you've got to figure out, one, what is going to work. What's the optimal time to get? There is no optimal time because the optimal time, what I always tell people is you want to work in accordance with your circadian rhythms.
It's really hard to fight your natural biorhythms. So I'm married to a night owl, right? I'm an extreme lark.
I get up really early. You want the best of my brain? Talk to me at like six, seven o'clock, eight o'clock in the morning.
You're going to get my best brain power. If you want my wife, you better talk to her at like four or five or six in the evening.

Most people are like Bezos.

Most people, this is why work starts at nine and things like that.

Most people start to hit their prime around nine or 10.

That's like normal body clocks, right?

I'm an extreme lark.

So my problem is I'll get up earlier and earlier.

And if I'm not careful, I'm waking up at like 1.30 in the morning. And now I have to go to bed at like, you know, six o'clock to be able to do that.
So like my problem is my body will keep waking up earlier and earlier because I really like it's just naturally that way. So that's how I set my day.
I think you should start with your hardest task first. And the reason is if I do nothing else in my day, but I wake up and I've done my writing, and then I have to take my dog out no matter what.
And I 90% of the time I hike with a weight vest and I do it for a bunch of different reasons. But one of which is it gives me, I mean, I'm going to go to the gym later in the afternoon, but in case my schedule gets crazier, it comes up.
It means that I've always gotten my exercise in. I've gotten a workout in because I'm going to do 45 minutes up a mountain with like 20 or 30 pounds on my back with my dog.
And I've gotten my hardest test. So I've sort of won my day by 9 a.m.
Most people, they're starting their day. I've already won most of my day by 9 a.m.
And then and I go from there. You know, I'll work till six or seven every night.
You know, I'm like the rest of us, I'm a workaholic, but it's that morning stretch that really matters. Doesn't feel like work when you love what you do.
Feels like play, right? Well, listen, I'll tell you the journey I've been on. It starts with sleep.
And a lot of people, they don't get the right sleep. Yeah.
By the way, I got to say, you're right. Because this is the first thing we find out when people come to train train with us, that's the first question we ask is, how much are you sleeping? Because if you're not sleeping seven to eight hours a night, sure, you can get into flow, but not reliably and repeatably because it's a high energy state.
So if you don't have the right nutrition, you don't have the right hydration, you don't have the right sleep. And I'm not saying there's one diet for flow, but you want to have energy.
So you got to eat healthy food that gives you energy and you need good hydration. So you're getting out of energy and you need seven to eight hours of sleep.
And you know, there's no argument with that. You know what? I got to speak to that too.
So like years ago, I did this video that's on YouTube with Robin Sharma. He wrote a book called many books, but he wrote the 5 a.m.
Club, yeah. And I interviewed him when he was working on the 5 a.m.
Club before it came out. And I also co-authored a book of the Miracle Morning for Addiction Recovery.
And I am more predominantly like a nocturnal person. I'd rather- But you're all, I know I can call you at six o'clock in the morning.
You're one of the few people I know I can call at that time. Well, yeah, what's funny, so like I was talking to my buddy, Dean Jackson, who you've had on your podcast.
And it's like, if you want a 5 a.m. club, it's really a 9 p.00 PM club.
Because if you try to get up at 5.00 AM, but you're going to bed at one in the morning, you're just going to be exhausted. And so part of it is, so you just described your, your flow in the morning, doing the hardest thing.
What happens before you go to bed hour, two hour, whatever, is there anything that you could, you could share? Because Tommy does the same thing. Tommy has his rituals, but there's before bed and there's after, but he says the most important thing is sleep.
So what's happening before? All right. We can talk about clear goals, which are a flow trigger.
And this is about a properly daily to do this. But the second thing is flow is a high energy state.
And okay, let me tell you one flow trigger. We talk about one other flow trigger besides concentration that'll be really helpful.
The most important flow trigger is known as the challenge skills balance. Challenge skills balance.
Every listening is going to know exactly what I'm talking about when I explain it. So the idea here is flow follows focus.
We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge slightly exceeds our skillset. You want to stretch, but not snap.
So if I were to describe it emotionally, right? There's something known as the flow channel. It sits between boredom and anxiety.
Boredom is, hey, there's not enough stimulation here. I don't give a fuck.
I can't pay attention. Anxiety, whoa, way too much.
I'm paying too much attention. In between is this sweet spot.
It's known as the flow channel. If you're a physiologist, this is the Erks-Dobson curve.
And we've known about this since like 1906. So say this, spell that? Erks, Y-E-R-K-E-S hyphen D-O-B-S-O-N.
Erks-Dobson curve. And it basically says no matter what the stimulants is, there's a music, certain level, it sounds too low.
You can't hear it. You can't hear it.
You can't hear it. And then there's a sweet spot in the middle where we like it.
And then it gets too loud. That's everything, including flow.
Same thing. So there's a sweet spot, the flow channel.
Anxiety, if there's too much anxiety, you're going to block flow. A little bit focuses attention.
This is you using fear as a motivator. This is me using fear as a motivator.
You're not using abject terror as a motivator because that'll blow you out, right? Then all you can think about is the thing you're scared of. There's no maneuverability.
So that said, flow requires you to manage your nervous system and manage your energy levels on a regular basis. So at the end of my day, to answer your question, Joe, and I'm not sure how it really does this, I will work to wherever I work to.
I need roughly two and a half hours afterwards. I am going to go.
The first thing you want to do is have an active recovery protocol. Passive recovery is TV and a beer.
And both are terrible for performance. Alcohol will fuck up REM sleep.
So you can have one to maybe two drinks, right? But now once you go over two drinks, and if you weigh like I do, which is like 160, it's one drink. With you, it's two drinks.
But with me, it's like one drink.

Anything beyond that blocks REM sleep.

So I've just messed up my sleep, right?

It's a big one.

No alcohol.

No alcohol.

You know what?

I will say I did a thing.

It was really funny.

Richard Branson and I did a thing.

We're both, I think, marijuana advocates.

I'm aware, you know, have been marijuana advocates for various reasons.

We did a thing about marijuana together.

Somebody asked me in the Q&A question, like, do you have any business advice?

What's your like one thing?

Smuggle bowl.

No, he said, quit drinking. Quit drinking.
Quit drinking. He said, quit drinking.
It's the most important. It's funny because I've spent a lot of time with Richie.
Yeah, you have. You know he says that too.
I spent six weeks on his island, yeah. So alcohol is a flow blocker.
Alcohol is a recovery blocker. TV is a recovery blocker.
And most people don't know this, so they don't realize this is about YouTube or TV. And social media, yeah.
Social media. Well, social media, we know, right? But we don't realize that like TV does it because it's really subtle.
So here's the problem. If you want to recover, right? All the active recovery protocols, whether it's a sauna or an Epsom salt bath or breath work or mindfulness or a long walk in nature.

All these things, what they're doing is they're putting your brain into alpha. Alpha is like a basic, it's the recovery brainwave.
It's relaxed. It's daydreaming mode.
It's creative. And when we watch TV, the brain, that's that couch pit of people.
I'm just watching it. But what you don't realize is every time there's a quick cut on television, at an unconscious level, your brain goes from alpha up to high beta.
High beta is essentially at the edge of fight or flight. And the reason is we evolved in an environment where when anything moves quickly, it could be a threat.
It could be a predator, right? It could also be an opportunity. Maybe this is something I can eat or have sex with or something I got to run away from.
Every time you're watching TV and you see that quick cut, you're just chilling. Your brain freaks out.
You don't notice it, but your brain goes, is that a threat? What just happened? It's blocking recovery. I'm not saying TV bad.
I'm saying TV before bed, bad. TV before bed, bad.

Bad.

And so like to me. And that would probably also include social media.
Social media. Yeah.
Any sort of screen time. You know what is great? Books.
Books. So nobody wants to tell you this.
I always tell people, they're like, well, there are so many choices. De-stressing wise, like, what do I do? And I'm like, it's simple depending on how much time you have.
If you've got five minutes, if you have five minutes of time and you want to reset your nervous system, there's certain things you want to do. If you have six minutes, read a book.
No, seven to 11 minutes. If you want to reset your nervous system really, really quickly, breath work can't really do it until you get to about 7 to 11.
7 to 11 breath work. Yeah.
So if you've got like literally six minutes of reading fiction. Six minutes of fiction.
Fiction will calm your nervous system down. What's the best fiction? It doesn't matter.
The thing you want to avoid here is like super fast-paced thriller fiction where it's making you a little more agitated. Like almost anything else will work.
This is only reading or audible. I haven't seen data on audible and the nervous system.
And what I really think is learning styles is kind of crap. Like there was this idea that some people are visual learners and somebody is auditorial, somebody is kinesthetic.

And we're all sort of blended. But there are handfuls of people who are just they're audible learners, right? They need to learn that way.
But as a general rule, if you can avoid audiobooks, if you've got a job where you're stopping traffic a lot or something like, yeah, listen to podcasts, read audiobooks for sure. But if you can avoid them, and the reason is we know when you listen or read electronic

books instead of actual physical books, you retain less.

And it's because the part of our brain that developed for memory is the hippocampus.

It originated from map making.

Your brain is like you were a hunter-gatherer.

Where is the cave with the saber-toothed tiger so I could avoid it? Where's the ripe fruit tree come springtime? Where's the good watering hole, right? This is what the brain was designed to evolve. So we use the thickness of a book, the geography of a book, literally to help us with memory.
So your brain won't just remember the fact it remembers where where, like this, if you tell me about your

favorite books and you tell me about your favorite quotes, I'll bet I can say, where

in the book is that quote?

You can sort of give me a general geographical reason.

And a lot of people can tell you where on the page it is.

And that's why.

So like a Kindle or whatever would not allow that.

Kindle.

You can't get back to it.

Yeah.

If you get, so if you look at the studies on memory and reading, it's the highest. The real book.
The highest when we read actual real physical books. Fascinating.
Let me ask you a question. So, because people have heard this a million times, you know, don't look at your phone before bed.
And instead of acting in any way, shape or form, like I'm somehow above this, both me and Tommy are friends with Dr. Anna Lemke, who wrote Dopamine Nation.

And a lot of people misinterpret what dopamine is. It's a neurotransmitter of anticipation.
And when you're looking at a phone and it's a dopamine cash register, you are anticipating other stuff. Hey, I hope you're loving today's episode.
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That's freedomevent.com. Now back to the episode.
So it is extraordinarily hard when someone's conditioned to not wake up in the morning, look at their phone, or not look at your phone before you go to bed. What is actually happening when you are looking at a screen versus a book that you're saying no screen time? Because people hear no screen time all the time, but I'd love for you to describe neurochemically, what is the draw? Why is it so hard for people to put it down? What is it training our brains to do? And how is it a flow killer? If you could speak to it in that.
So the good news is I don't have to say much beyond what I've already said. One of it is like books are fixed, right? The words are, they're not jumping around the page and flashing and blinking and whatever.
So cell phones, as you pointed out, what technology did they base cell phones on? You know this, they designed them to function like slot machines. The most, right? Addictive, distracting, lots of bells and whistles, lots of noises.
Our phones, your focus goes all over the place. In a sense, the brain doesn't multitask.
It's a total lie, right? I was on the original panel on multitasking with Cliff Ness out of Stanford. I worked on it.
We are not built to multitask. We can serial process information, but we do that at a subconscious level.
The conscious level, the conscious mind goes one thing at a time. It doesn't process two or three things at once.
You have to switch tasks. Every time there's task switching, there's a cost to it.
I want to dive into that a little bit. For sure.
So like with phones, one is the anticipation, right? You're right. Dopamine is a, I mean, and even calling dopamine a chemical of anticipation is a lot because what are multi-tools? Neurochemicals are multi-tools.
Dopamine, norepinephrine, anandamide, serotonin, all these things. They do tens of thousands of jobs in the brain.
The brain is really concerted by design. So it finds something that works and it reuses it and reuses it and reuses it and reuses it.
No need to reinvent the wheel each time. Oh, this works.
Can it work over here? Can it work over here? Can it work over here? That's sort of how neurochemicals function. Dopamine does a lot of different stuff in the brain.
Most people don't realize, I'll give you a really simple example. Why does time pass so strangely in the flow? One reason is when there's more dopamine in your system, time speeds up.
And when there's less dopamine in your system, it slows down. You want to hear, this is weird.
You want to talk about mind-body connection stuff. Like we used to think these were two separate things and they've been coming closer and closer and closer together.
Here's the craziest mind-body connection story. There's a whole bunch of new research that says, they did this, they wounded people.
They put cuts on their arms. And some people, time passed through it.
They asked them how slow was time passing for you or how fast it was passing for you. The people who thought time was passing faster, their wounds heal faster.
People who thought time was dragging on board, it took them longer to heal. So the latest front of like the mind-body connection is literally how we perceive the passage of time impacts wound healing.
The question that I ask myself all the time about that one is we're all weightlifters. Weightlifting is about tearing the muscle or wounding the muscles, right? And regrowing them.
So the question I've been asking myself, but I don't have an answer. I just think it's fascinating is, wait a minute, if I'm wounding my muscles all the time and then I'm in flow all the time and I'm not noticing the passage of time, it's really sped up that way.
Am I getting bigger faster? Right? Is this a way to get bigger? And nobody knows the answers to that. Nobody's really looked at this because the wound healing stuff is new, but it's cool cutting edge stuff.
So you said seven to 10 minutes breath work, six minutes. What's the five minutes? Have you got five minutes only? Oh, a gratitude list.
Gratitude list. I was reading that.
A gratitude practice is five minutes. If you've got six.
Ten things. No, well, you do one of two ways.
Most psychologists, most like positive psychologists don't do the ten things. They will say, write down three things you're grateful for.
And this is what you can do in five minutes. Three things you're grateful for and turn one of them into a paragraph.
And it's worth talking about sort of like, it's just worth talking about why that works because people hear gratitude and you hear it all over the fricking place. And it sounds to a lot of us, right? Unless you're come up in a spiritual tradition or things like that, it just seems wonky.
So why would gratitude work? And it's important because gratitude works for the same reasons affirmations fail.

We have phenomenal built-in bullshit detectors. So if I'm looking in the mirror and I'm doing an affirmation, I'm a millionaire, I'm a millionaire, I'm a millionaire.
And my mirror self is looking

back at me and going, dude, you work at Walmart, shut the fuck up, right? It's demotivating.

I'm lying to myself and I know I'm lying to myself and I'm literally, but if I'm looking

in the mirror and going, I am so happy and grateful that I woke up this morning and I'm breathing and my legs are working. Well, that's real.
That's real. And if, when you start listing things that you're grateful for the brain, we evolve in a high threat environment.
So the brain is the word. This is a crazy word.
Homeostasis. Homeostasis literally just means balance, right? So let me give you a crazy example.
There's dopamine involved in this process. So the brain is a prediction engine.
That's what it does all the time. It's always saying what's about to happen and how much energy do I need to meet that challenge? Remember, we go back to efficiency.
The first order of business for the brain is save energy. Calories are freaking expensive.
It's hard to get food in the environments we evolved in. So how do I preserve energy? If you know the doorknob is open, you don't need to put your shoulder into the door and waste all that energy trying to bust the door open.
You just turn the knob, right? So when you're reaching for that knob, your brain is trying to predict, is it going to be unlocked? How much energy I need for that, right? Doing that all the time. When it matches your prediction, you don't notice, right? You think the door is going to be unlocked.
You open the door and walk through it. You didn't even notice it.
You did it. You notice when it doesn't match your prediction.
And that noticing that like, oh, it's locked, that feeling you get, that's because dopamine has been cut off. So every time we match prediction, you get a little bit of dopamine, a little bit of dopamine.
And when we don't, it gets cut off. So you asked a question that started me talking about prediction.
What was that? Let's back up into it. I was just getting into this whole reverse engineering, like the brain's prediction machine.

God, I'll just talk your face off and go on random. No, I love this.
It's a little speak to prediction in the way that you perceive it. Well, that's, I mean, that was the example.
I'm just trying to think why I started telling you about the brain as a prediction engine. And no, no, we were talking about, oh, gratitude, gratitude.
Okay, gratitude, right. Three things in one.
So what we don't realize is that the brain takes in, we take an unlimited amount of information, right? But on average, the brain will take in nine negatives for every one positive thing that comes through. So we get nine negative bits of information.
This is dangerous. This is scary.
This is don't do this. Don't do this.
Don do this. For every positive that gets through.
Those positive things are the basis of creativity, opportunity, like for entrepreneurs, really, really, really critical because you're always looking for opportunity. You're always looking for novelty and new information, not the same old thing that scares you.
So what a gratitude list is, it tips it. You stop taking about five negative for every positive.
For that day? Yeah, for that period of time. So it calms you down, goes, oh, you're safer than you think.
And it lets you start seeing more of the world. It opens up perception.
So you're getting in novelty and opportunity. All these things are starting to come in and things are a lot less threatening.
So that gratitude does that in five minutes. Reading is about six minutes.
If you have seven to 11, 15 ish, you probably want to do breath work. If you've got 15 to like 25 minutes, I would do, I would take a page out of Tommy's book.
I'd go for a long walk in nature. That's the like 15 to 20 minutes, 25 minutes, go for a walk.
If you've got 25 to like 45 minutes, go get a workout in, right? Exercise is the best cure for your nervous system, right? Best way to really calm it down. There's other things you can do.
So eight minutes of petting a dog, petting an animal, social connection will do this too, but eight minutes of petting a dog starts producing oxytocin and a whole bunch of those neurochemicals for connection. So there are other like little hacks in there, but you, my point to get back to it, you asked, what do you do at the end of the day? I do an active recovery protocol, right? Usually I finish working.
I either go, I've already worked out. So I'll go right into a sauna.

And I like to do breath work and reading inside a sauna. So I write, I've got an infrared sauna.
You tend to stay them for a long time, like half an hour, 30, 40 minutes. I can do 20 minutes of breath work and 20 minutes of reading and a sauna.
So saunas automatically lower cortisol. They do it automatically.
And then I massively amped up my recovery with some breath work and with some reading. By the way, what breath work do you? I rotate it.
I rotate it. It depends on if my nervous system is really agitated, right? If I'm really sped up, I will do a Wim Hof style breath with breath holding because it's more effective at calming you down when you're already really sped up.
If I'm slightly calmer, I'm going to do a focus meditation. I tend to do sound meditation a lot because I like it.
It works really well for me. Sometimes I'll just count my breath or do things like that for a bunch of different reasons.
If I really have the time, I will do loving kindness meditation. Of all the meditative systems, loving kindness meditation does some really interesting things that the other ones don't do.
So one of them is loving kindness meditation actually has anti-aging properties. So they did a bunch of studies of focus meditation versus loving kindness meditation.
And one of the things they were looking at was telomere land. So telomeres are the caps on chromosomes, right? And as we age, the chromosomes shrink, right? We lose our telomeres.
Loving kindness meditation actually increases telomere health. So you can calm down your nervous system and it's got an anti-aging benefit.
So the other thing about loving kindness meditation, we know this as adults, this is adult development. So if you wanna have a successful second half of your life, you wanna be happy, healthy, and joyous like 45 forward, by age 50, if you really wanna enjoy the second half of your life and have a high flow and all that, you need to forgive most of the people who have done you wrong.
If you carry grudges into the second half of your life, it tends to make you miserable over time and it blocks. So humans, most people don't know this, but your brain development doesn't stop as a kid.
It keeps going. And there's really cool, amazing things that happen in your brain in your forties and fifties.
You actually, if you get it right, and we'll talk about what right means in a second, you unlock whole new levels of intelligence, whole new, this is in our country, right? This is peak performance age. You get new levels of intelligence, new levels of creativity, new levels of wisdom, new levels of empathy.
Now, think about this from a business perspective, right? What do we know about the world today? Well, customer-centric thinking is really important because our customers matter. If you don't have empathetic employees, you're going to fuck up your company culture and you're going to fuck up your customer relationships.
If you don't have wise employees, same problems. So, these are all the things we actually want in people.
So it really matters. How do we unlock these things? There's only two things to do.
One, by about age 50, you have to forgive all the people who have done you wrong. And how do you do that? Well, there's a lot.
You can spend years in psychotherapy, give it a go, or you can do loving kindness meditation. Loving kindness meditation tends to do that work for you.
The other thing you need to do is learn how to be creative. So to have a successful second half of your life, flow is very deeply involved in it.
But just to like sort of get in the door, you have to be able to be creative and you have to forgive the people who've done you wrong. Starting in your late 40s, 50s, creativity is what unlocks these new thinking styles in your brain.
There's a bunch of brain changes. The two sides of the brain start working together like never before.
The brain starts to colonize underutilized resources and things like this. There's things that happen in your brain.
And loving kindness, meditation, or forgiveness plus creativity is how you really take advantage of it. And it leads to more flow also.
I want to ask you a question about this because I think it bothers me and I think it bothers a lot of other people, but I've danced with it a lot. It's criticism, right? So let me give you just a basic example, not being attacked viciously with someone I don't even know.
So the other day, so me and Tommy have our books up. Mine's What's in it for them is book Elevate.
And I was reading a review on amazon where someone gave me a one-star and all my writer friends never read reviews and but i was doing a test to see like okay let's see how it bothers me so nestled between a one-star review where this person was like joe used to put out such great stuff and he's lost it like someone that i don't have no idea who this person is you lost a fan it's worse it's worse that's worse that they hated you at the beginning. No, he's like, you know, it's not as good as earlier work.
And it's like, I've put more work into this book than anything, but right above and below that, in terms of the timeline, if you sort by recency, this is the best book I have ever read. I bought three copies for a friend.
I've listened to it on audio twice and I'm reading it now that, and it's just like the perception of it. But the funny thing is, is the vast majority of the reviews are five stars.
And I'm like, so what is it about criticism? What is happening where someone has it? Because you said the brain fixates on stuff. So gratitude, I think, snaps out of it.
But I'm curious. Criticism is interesting because coming up as a journalist, I've never been in a field where people are ruder than in journalists.
Editors dealing with journalists. My favorite story is Wired Magazine.
The editor, this is a good friend of mine still. Wired Magazine sends me to the Everglades.
I'm writing about the Everglades restoration project. It's $8 billion to fix the Everglades.
Largest public works project anybody's ever done. I live in a freaking swamp for three months.
Middle of the Everglades. The only place to get dinner is the raunchiest strip club.
I mean, it's like the worst thing. I've never seen anything like what was going on in the strip club in the middle of the Everglades.
It's the only place to eat. There's a gas station in a strip club.
And it's like scientists and people who are killing alligators for a living and selling boot skins and things like that. Nobody else is out there.
It's a tough story to report. I spent four or five months writing it, turning it to my editor.
He calls me up. He's like, Stephen, there's just one thing I didn't understand.
I read your story. There's just one thing I didn't understand.
And I am just like, I'm that good. I just one thing I got, I was like, what's that Adam? He's like every motherfucking word you wrote.
And I had to start over like literally like, and that comment in editors, editors, speaking to writers like that, that was what I did for 15 years. I had people just rude to me all the time because they're overworked.
They got to get the pieces in and they don't have time for crap writing. It's easier for them to be rude to me and hire another writer to put them on the story than it may be to help me fix it sometime.
And this is way before the world of AI where people can leave. And this is also, by the way, this was my, here's the part of that story that I left out.
I told you I bankrupted myself from Lyme disease. This was my comeback story.
So I needed this money so desperately, like I was so poor and I needed them to accept this story. My point is that I've gotten like, it's funny because there are one-star reviews on, you know, people say all kinds of crap, but I don't take any of the personal stuff personally.

But it's like, I always assume if somebody doesn't like something, this is when I work

with editors too.

And, or really I do it in business too.

If you don't like something of mine, I believe that there's probably something wrong on the

page where you were like, yeah, I really, I got lost here.

I don't get what you're doing.

I'm not into that. I don't think you know what you're talking about.
I just think something's wrong there. You don't have any clue.
You don't know enough about writing or my story or whatever. Be accurate with your, but something's wrong there.
So I take the criticism as, okay, there's something here. Like I'm in the neighborhood.
I don't trust your opinion because I don't think you have enough expertise about my thing. You have to tell me the exact thing that's wrong, but I trust enough that you're in the neighborhood and I just take it.
And I'm like, okay, how do I do it better next time so that this neighborhood doesn't want to revolt against me? Right. That's how I sort of think about it.
But I don't like, I don't know. I, you know, I'm an old school punk rocker.
So like, I'm kind of used to you not liking me. Right.
I grew up in Ohio with a Mohawk, like the whole state wanted to beat me up for 20 years. Some people are derailed by criticism.
Other people use it as fuel. So the reason I bring it up is like Tommy's comment about fear.
It's like, some will see some type of rejection. It's like, I'm not good enough.
They go into a shame cycle. They can't function.
Others are like, man, they use that as fuel. Let me actually speak at this in a flow way.
So people ask me like, what is the goal you're training? Training me in flow? What's a win? What do we call success? And so I'm going to use a couple of technical terms, then I'll explain. So what success to me is, as I said, clear goals are a flow trick.
So a daily to-do list, well set. Well, and we can talk about what that means, what that looks like.
I want to dive into that. We'll dive into that because it's probably important.
But to me, there's a term in flow. So flow is defined, psychologists define flow.
It has six core characteristics. How do you know if you're in flow? How do you know if your team's in flow? Complete concentration on the task at hand, the merger of action and awareness, vanishing or disappearing of the sense of self, time dilation, time passes strangely.
And then there's two other things. There's a sense of control, right? I look at you in flow and it looks from the outside looking in, it looks like peak performance, right? I see Michael Jordan in flow.
He's just putting buckets, right? On the inside, it feels like, oh shit, I can control things I couldn't normally control, right? This could be Michael Jordan. He used to talk about being in the zone, being in flow.
The basket looks as big as a hula hoop, but I can't miss. Me and flow as a writer, right? Like suddenly my sentences are sort of dancing around the page at four o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday.
That's not usually what happens, like right when I sit down at 4 a.m., but, you know, that's what will happen. Or it's a great brainstorming session where the ideas are just ping-ponging out, that sense of control.
Then the other, the last one, and this is where I was going, this is the point, is flow is described as

an autotelic experience.

Autotelic is a Greek word, and all it means is an end in itself.

It means flow is so joyful, so ecstatic, so much fun.

If I were to put it in addiction terms, I would say flow is the most addictive state

on earth it is.

It's just a positive addiction.

It leads us forward into the future that we want to go to rather than most addictions which lead us backwards and drag us down but flow is it's the same you know same reason yeah i see i you know if you want to use addiction positive or negative i would maybe frame it this way it's like you know flow expands you the opposite contracts you yeah that's great that's Okay. So when you can make the clear goals list, your daily to-do list, an autotelic experience, meaning the completion of all the items on your clear goals list, generates, is joyful, drops you into flow.
So it becomes its own motivation. That's my goal.
If I can get you to there, right, you're dangerous. So one of the things that happens, and you guys are going to totally agree with me on this, what you get from that clear goals list.
I'm not talking about like, I got everything done on my list today, but I've now done it for like five years in a row. And you know what happens if you get everything done on your clear goals list day after day after day, you get way more done than you could possibly shake a stick at.
So you end up looking back on your five years and you're like, look what I did. So when you take criticism and you've got that kind of track record where your clear goals list is automatic and you've done that, you've built.
Because what really gets built with that is the confidence that you can produce at a really high level. You can meet your goals.
This is the other thing people don't realize. They set goals.
If you don't meet your goals, you're training your brain that it's okay to not meet your goals. You're training your brain that it's okay to be, I'm going to use it, to be a loser, right? To not be who you want to be, not live the way you are.
You're always teaching yourself something, right? You're either teaching yourself this is the good way to go, or this is the bad way to go. We don't accomplish our goals.
I always tell people, don't ever, ever, ever speak your goal out loud unless you were absolutely, like if I say it out loud, my word is my bond is going to get done no matter what. And it's not even about as much about integrity or honesty or all those things that matter.
It's about the fact that if I set a goal and I don't accomplish it, I'm training my brain that it's okay to not accomplish goals. And your brain is an energy efficient engine.
Once you start not accomplishing your goals and your brain goes, oh, it's okay if you don't accomplish your goals. I don't even need to generate energy.
So if you break your word to yourself, every time you set a goal and you don't keep it, you're breaking your word to yourself. You're training your brain.
It's okay to fail. It's fine to fail.
That's just fine. And after a little while, your brain goes, oh, you're not going to succeed anyways because you just say this shit.
It's not real. We're not even going to bother getting in the fight.
It works the same way. You understand the neuroscience of mindset, right? If you have a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset, when they look in the brains of people who have fixed mindsets, when things go wrong, they don't learn from their mistakes because the brain doesn't even turn on the learning machinery because why waste the energy? If you've got a fixed mindset that you can't grow, you believe your talent is innate, there's nothing you can do.
You can't grow from this. So your brain just stops producing the energy completely.
This is Carol Dweck's work. And we also discovered if you have a fixed mindset, it blocks flow for the same reason.
So these are two of the things that we've discovered along the way. People with regular gratitude practice and people with a growth mindset have way more flow.
One of the things people always ask me is like, how do you accomplish so much just a little time? And I'm like, it's pretty simple. My most opened app on my phone is my calculator.
I love math and I love KPIs and I love reverse engineering, whether that's getting to the 10% body fat soon to be 8%, whether that's these massive goals, hit a billion in revenue, I need 2,000 technicians to win 500,000 a year. So I got this, what would need to be true for this goal to happen? A smart goal, specific, meaningful, attainable, realistic, with a timely basis.
My goals are stretch goals. Everything's a time goal.
But mathematically, it's already been done. It's been manifested.
It's just, these are the steps. So I always tell people, we talked about the challenge skills balance, right? There's actually a number.
So Chiksetmehi put a number on it. We, with a Google mathematician, they were like, when your challenge is 4% greater than your skills, that's the sweet spot for maximizing flow and focus.
And Tommy, you were talking about this earlier. You and I both set these impossible goals, like really crazy, big, high-hard goals, but you chunk it down.
So what's in front of you today is 4%, right? 4% to 5%. In fact, my favorite story is Alex Honnold, who everybody knows from pre- free solo, right? So I like the half dome story.
So 10 years before he climbed El Cap, he free soloed half dome in 2012. So half dome, Yosemite takes about most climbers, about a day and a half to climb it.
They bring portal edges, they sleep on the side of the wall. Alex free soloed it.
So no portal edges, no ropes, you fall, you die. Everything's through the roof.
Most people We'll take about a day and a half to climb it. As I said, Alex climbed solid.
So no portal edges, no ropes. You fall, you die.
Everything's through the roof.

Most people think about a day and a half to climb it.

As I said, Alex climbed half dome in an hour and 22 minutes.

It's like the rough equivalent of running a four minute mile in 43 seconds.

Like that's essentially what it's the, in my, like if you see Stephen, what's the craziest,

most impossible thing you've ever seen anybody do.

That's the one. I mean, maybe there are others, but like for my money, that's the thing that I look at.
I'm just like, but if you ask Alex, how did you do it? Like, how the hell do you do these impossible things? He'll say the same thing. He'll say 4% plus 4% plus 4% day after day, week after week, year after year for a career.
That's how you do the impossible. That's always how you do the impossible.

There's no other formula.

This is how we're designed to work.

And so it's always 4% to 5% at a time.

In fact, if you try to go 10% or 20%, you're actually going to stall out because it's too

much anxiety, too much cortisol, too much norepinephrine, and you're going to block

performance.

And when I say block performance, let me give you the example. So I'm going to get a little neuro geeky technical here, but my favorite structure in the brain is the anterior cingulate cortex.
Why is because it's, it chooses when we make decisions, are we going to make the logical, linear, tried, true, safe, secure decision, or are we going to do something creative and interesting? And it makes this decision based on how much fear you have. So if you've got too much fear, your brain starts to limit your options.
We all know this, the extreme example is fight or flight, right? You're really freaked out. So your brain says, no, no, no, no.
Three options. You can flee, you can freeze, or you can fight.
That's all you can do. What we don't realize is that all fear does that.
Your brain goes, oh, I'm scared. Give me something that worked last time.
Let me give you the conservative choice. As entrepreneurs, I'm a big fan of what Branson said, and we wrote about this.
You definitely want to protect the downside. I think you want to find ways to protect the downside.
But as entrepreneurs, you're looking for the creative, interesting solution that keeps you sort of ahead. And if too much fear, it completely blocks that.
So you get really logical. You get really linear.
And I always tell, I think as a hiring practice, I always tell my team, remember, we're hiring two people. You're hiring the person when everything is going well, and they're in a good mood.
And you're hiring the person when they're terrified and scared. So I always, usually, if you want to come work with me, we're going to put you through a fairly rigorous test trial period.
And in that trial period, I'm going to overload you. I'm going to scare you a little bit.
And it's not that I need you to succeed. I don't give a shit if you can pull the task off or not pull the task off.
How do you respond? How do you respond? How are you when you're scared? Because the employees who totally shut down and get really, really selfish and really logical, and they wish most people when they're scared, I don't want to work with them. Those are not my people.
That's not helpful because the things I do for a living, like we move really, really, really fast and there are high consequences and you roll the dice a lot. And when you're writing books and you're doing things in public, there's consequences.
You know what I mean? We're playing with live ammo and we're training the best of the best of the best of the best of the best. And like they're playing with live ammo, right? Also like their lives are live.
I always remind them, but like there are lives at the other end of this conversation. There's a question.
I'll never forget this. I was 17 or 18 and I wouldn't work for Cheesecake Factory as a busboy.
One of the questions they said is, you said scenario and there's no right answer. Client comes in, potential customer wants to get sat.
You got food that's ready that needs to get delivered to the table. You also got someone asking where the restroom is.
You also realize the server has been double sat. How do you react to that? And really the answer, there's no right answer.
It's just, I rely on my team, I do this. It's an order of operations.
There's no wrong answer. When people just don't know, they're like, they can't critically think about a solution.
And that's what I'm looking for is people that can critically think on their feet. So scenario-based is what are you going to do in this scenario? Because you take a step back.
When we talk about checklists, I rely a lot on Google Calendar. Almost, I counted the things the other day, and I think it's a little too much.
It's 23 things in my calendar. And now talking to you, I'm like, I probably need four hours of nothing except for those big things to get done that day.
Yeah. Let's talk about how to set a clear goals list.
Okay. You said, we started this conversation with what are the flow? Where do you start? You want more flow in your life? Where do you start? we've actually covered two thirds of my answer.
Complete concentration. So like,

I,

I, we started this conversation with what are the flow? Where do you start? One more flow in your life where you start. We've actually covered two thirds of my answer, complete concentration.
So like I always start with distraction management, start with the simple stuff. The only thing I caveat, if you're burned out and most of us are burned out, start by sort of calming your nervous system down, getting sleeping, right? Start there.
Then the next thing, complete concentration is how you sort of prep the space for, oh, I'm going to go in here and this is my focus time. Challenge skills balance is how you attack your project, right? I always like to automate.
So, I'll give you an example. Things have to be pretty straightforward and simple for me.
So, when I say clear goals, I said I start my day writing writing, right? So my first day is write my, whatever book I'm writing. If I'm starting the book, it's right.
500 to 600 words because that's 4%. So, and the reason as a writer is in the way I write, usually about 350, 400 words, you have to transition between ideas, go from idea one to idea two.
That's the hardest thing for a writer. That's the most complicated thing.
So I can write 350 words in my sleep, but at around 350, I got to transition you out of that paragraph into a new set of ideas into whatever. That's hard.
That's going to catch me. It's going to take some elbow grease.
If I'm in the middle of the book and I know more of what I'm doing, I write 700 to 800 words a day, maybe a thousand. And at the end of the book, I know what the fuck I'm doing.
So it's 1500 words a day. So when it says, you know, first list of my thing, clear goals list is write the new novel.
It's goals are clear. So when you say clear goals, the reason the point is not a daily to-do list.
And why do we call it a clear goals list? Clarity is what matters. It's a focus game.
You're playing a focus game with your brain. What should your brain pay attention to now? What should it pay attention to next? That's why clarity matters.
The goal matters a lot less than the clarity. So I usually, it's like 500 words that leave readers feeling excited in your goal.
Did this come as the outcome? No, you don't want to focus on outcome. You want to focus on process, sort of.
Well, 500 words is an outcome, but it's not, I'm going to write 500 words that get me on the New York Times bestseller list. I just want to write 500 words that maybe make my reader feel curious or scared or empathetic or whatever.
That's my clear goals list. It's much done and this feeling to the reader.
That's all I need. So now we've talked about what a clear goal is.
I said before, if you can start your workday in accordance with your circadian rhythms, because it's hard to fight against your own physiology, start with your hardest task. So your first thing is your biggest win.
And remember that energy and willpower diminish over time. So you want to go in order from the hardest, sort of the easiest.
This is the most important thing, Tommy, do a trial period. Spend like two to three weeks and ask yourself, how many things can I do in a day and still be excellent at all

of them? Because what you don't want to do is put more shit on your clear goals list than you can actually accomplish and be a great. If you want to be a peak performer, set yourself up to win.
If you know in an average day, based on what you do for a living, you can get eight to 10 things done, that's your clear goals list. Now, two caveats here.
First one, if it takes energy, it goes on the list. That's the point.
You have a limited energy budget. So a lot of people won't be like, okay, have discussion with my wife about what to do about my son's drinking problem.
Isn't going to go on most people's clear goals list, but it's got to, because it's going to take a mess. That's a freaking hard conversation.
It's going to take a ton of energy, right? So like working out needs to go on your goal list. Why? Because it's going to take a bunch of energy, right? And this, you're just, it's energy management we're doing with this thing, right? It's focus and energy management.
And then the most important thing is once you figured out, oh, I can do nine things in a day and be excellent at them. Once you've done those nine things, you've won your day.
Now it's time to shut it down and recover, right? You have to be able to tell your brain, okay, you've done enough. This is a win.
You pulled it off. Now turn off.
Now recover. Let me calm down my nervous system.
Let me have this active recovery protocol. Let me be able to sleep at night.
Take your mind off this stuff. And one of the reasons that's so important is the brain has a built-in pattern recognition system.
So you do a lot of problem solving. Once you can get your conscious mind off the problem and let your subconscious chew on stuff.
That's why, you know, if you're, one of the reasons I'm such an extreme lark is like, I always tell people like, I'm not the guy. If you're having a crisis and you need like somebody to come into the room and solve that problem right there, then I'm not the guy.
If you can wait a night to solve the crisis, I'm absolutely the best guy you can find for it. That's what I need to sleep on it.
And I can wake up and my subconscious will solve the problems for me. So we talked a lot about goals.
We talked about bite-sized goals. We talked about three types of goals.
And one of the definitions you put in one of your books was the ultimate condition for accomplishing the impossible as well. The ultimate condition for accomplishing the impossible.
And how do you eat a elephant? One bite of it. One bite of it.
And I think that's really what we're talking about. Four percent of the time, man.
So here's a summary of a few things. Number one is you're absolutely right.
When I got a clean office, when I got my bed's made, when things are done right, when the meals are served right, when I get the right sleep, when the hydration is working right. Like all these things.
Number one is you're absolutely right. When I got a clean office, when I got my bed's made, when things are done right, when the meals are served right, when I get the right sleep, when the hydration's working right, like all these things compounded in more productivity, for sure.
I find myself exactly like you said, I hit a wall and it just turns off. Like I cannot do this anymore.
And sometimes I like the people are trying to rein me in and say, you're the one that set up this 14 hour day. So I got to, my thing is like, I have a hard time saying, no, I think you do.
Oh yeah. Especially with like people that, Hey, I need a minute.
I'm overly accommodating to my own demise sometimes. So much.
And like, I see a guy like Dan and a lot of these people, they're like, no, they say no. And Dan told me, he goes, you need to practice.
He goes, what is your most important thing? He goes, it's probably keeping my word. And he goes, so that's the first thing we're going to break.
He goes, you need to practice breaking your word. He goes, if you promise the neighbor you're going to mow their lawn for the next four years, you need to figure out a way and say your time has changed.
And you need to pay them back, find somebody else to do it, figure out a way out of that. Because that's your demise, is your word is your bond.
You're making that statement. So what happens if you're helping out? That's not fair to everyone else around you.
That's not fair to your company. That's not fair to your parents.
It's not fair to Bree. So that's one thing I'm really working on.
And it sounds bad, breaking your promise, breaking your word, but it's not leaving somebody high and dry. That's not the goal.
But I'm just trying to work through these things. It's very hard because if you say, my word is my bond, my word is my everything, then you're telling your brain you can never break it.
Well, let me say something to this because, I mean, it could be semantics. I would look at it as we're always, if we are growing and succeeding or bigger opportunities come along the way that you have to triage stuff, whatever you're renegotiating.
Yeah. I think, I'm curious to hear your take on the terminology of breaking your word because you don't want your brain to be like, I don't keep my word.
And at the same time, you got to keep your word to yourself. Absolutely.
Most importantly. Right.
Right. I mean, I think keeping your word to me would be walking away from the neighbor and being like, fuck you.
You know what I mean? I don't cut grass anymore. I fix garage doors.
I'm better than, you know what I mean? Like that's, that's breaking your word. You're sort of renegotiating and trying to fulfill on your promise and take care of the person, but you're just trying to re-strategize.
How are you doing it? Re-strategize. Yeah, that's a different, I'm thinking about that different.
You're trying to free yourself up if you've overcommitted the shit out of yourself. And I think we're notorious for our eyes for opportunity are bigger than our ability to logistically digest it all.
And we're all curious. The only reason I've been, the only reason I'm not as screwed on that one as other people is because I came up as a book writer.
And books are mad, like they're, you know, in the beginning, I mean, now I can write a book in a year, but in the beginning it was three, four, five, six, these were, you know, projects that, and this was all what I could do like six, seven hours a day. So there was a limited amount of time and it sort of taught me.
One of the things that I think of and who won't think about it this way, but you think about like, how do we define our lives? Like, what are the defining things we make? Our lives are much more defined by what we say no to than what we say yes to. We say yes to very few things.
You're going to say yes to how many partners over the course of a lifetime. You know what I mean? There are not a lot of yeses compared to the amount of no's you're saying.
You walk into a bookstore, you're saying no to most of the books. You're going to walk out with two or three books, right? You go see a movie, you're saying no to 30 movies.
You're saying yes to one of them. We're defined by our no's way more than our yeses.
So I just think about it that way a lot, which sort of like makes no a little more empowering. It doesn't like, sort of I'm a people pleaser too.
Right. I grew up in a, you know, it was scary at home.
It was scary at school. And so like the first thing I want to do is make sure you're happy.
You're okay. So you're not going to kick my teeth in because I'm not a particularly big guy and I don't like losing fights.
Yeah. You know, I love this stuff.
There's so much we keep going on. I mean, to understand this state, everyone feels it, everyone has it.
And when you get into it, it's like you're happy. But I do agree with you and the science, I guess, backs it up.
But if you're not creating and you're just taking this linear path and you shut off this creative side, then you really go nowhere. I find people just, I think, let me just ask you one question here.
A lot of it has to do with trust and getting burned along the way. Because if you can't trust people to get things done, I know a lot of people think if they don't do it, it won't get done right.
There's no delegation skills. There's no ability.
And people let you down. And no one will do it as good as you.
And a lot of people are closed. Most people in business tend to rely on themselves.

They become the worker. I mean, this is Michael Gerber.
Like you come in as the worker and you stay in that worker mode versus entrepreneur mode. Have you noticed any of that is like the power of delegation? Yeah.
I mean, like this is a hard one, but I have found, I'll give a Joe example. So I'll just give a marketing example.
So I wrote three cult classics in three different genres before I had a bestseller. And the first bestseller I had was Abundance, which I co-wrote with Peter.
Now, most people don't ever manage to write one cult classic in their lifetime, let alone three in three different areas, which sounds really fancy. What it tells you is I couldn't fucking find the mainstream with two hands and a flashlight.
Like, where are people? I couldn't do it. I couldn't figure out where are...
I'm a weird dude. So I can write these little sliver for super niche books for these people over here, these people over here.
But I had to partner with Peter. Peter was like, no, no, the mainstream is over here.
We're going to write abundance for everybody. It's wide.
I didn't know how to do that, nor did I know how to market it. So when I partnered with Peter, Peter partnered with Joe.
This was 10 years ago, 12 years ago, when you were doing a lot more fear-based stuff that I was morally and ethically, Joe will tell you this, like we butted heads. We liked each other.
We butted heads a lot. We first met each other because I had all kinds of ethical qualms, moral qualms, and I had standards.
It's got to be one of the things that I learned, but what I decided with abundance was, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. These guys clearly do.
So I'm going to watch Peter and Joe and everybody else sell the hell out of this book. I'm going to figure out exactly what they're doing.
And then I'm going to make it my own and do it my own way, which is exactly what I did. And my next book was rises humanity, all the things without all that stuff.
But I had to go through a period where I was like, the stuff that was out there that was representing me, I wasn't comfortable with any of it for really for a while. But I needed to go through that period to sort of like, this is what's okay.
This is what's not okay.

This is the same thing with delegation.

You have to, most people don't realize, and I guess if you do this public speaking a lot,

you know, you guys both know this.

As long as your mouth keeps moving, like you could stop making sense for a good like three,

four minutes.

But as long as your mouth keeps moving and you look like you know what you're talking

about, 95% of the people are not going to even notice. I'm not telling you to do this, but you could literally stand on a stage and start going from English to like, rebu up and floppy.
And most people aren't going to notice as long as you like presented as if you, right? Nobody is paying as much attention as you are. And you start to realize that like, there's certain things where a hundred percent quality, you know what I mean?? When I'm training customers, if you don't come out the other end with more flow in your life, I did not do my job at all.
So I've got no wiggle room on that one. I got to deliver that 100% of the time.
But there are certain things where if I'm putting out a I can actually, I can do it at 70% because it's going to be pretty effective. And the 30% of perfectionism isn't actually going to make that much of a difference because it's a piece of marketing copy and it's still deadly effective.
Now, yes, I'll A, B test it and figure out how to get it better. But there are certain things that you have to go, oh, I can trust my employees to do this because it doesn't have to be 100% out of go because we can test our way, our iterator way, our learner way, or have an adventure together.
And sometimes I do this with the people I get to work with. I'm like, look, there is no possible way we're going to get it right out of the gate.
We're just not going to get it right out of the gate. That's rare.
What is that quote? Perfect is the enemy of good is the enemy of the great. Better to be prolific than it is to be perfect.
I mean, there's many different ways. The idea about it is no one knows how to get started for the most part.
It's got to be perfect. We're not ready for that.
We're just not ready. And I'm like the type of guys we are.
We jump out of a plane. We build a parachute on the way down.
I'm like, shoot, ready, aim. Yeah, exactly.
You know what I mean? No, I mean, I think this is a really important point, especially because I know we're coming to an end here shortly. So for people listening, we are? Or are you just trying to kick us out of here? No, we're going to be here all day.
No, I know he needs to go to San Diego. I love this.
I'm politely looking out for Tommy at the moment, but now that we brought it up publicly, we'll just keep going with it. So getting started, there's always, you know, the man in the arena, Theodore Roosevelt.
If you've never read man in the arena, just type a man in the arena online, read the thing by Theodore Roosevelt. I mean, that's what makes a difference.
I mean, we're, and when it comes to ethic, let's talk about the book because I am, the term enthusiasm covers many deficiencies is something that my friend Dave Kekic said. So being in a flow state, you're going to be happier.
You're going to be more enthusiastic. You're going to be more connected when it comes to say no, you can say no without being an asshole.
You can use some evaluation of like, you know, what's the short term and long-term. You want to protect yourself, you want to keep the word to yourself, all that is critically important.
And marketing, like for instance, with your book, hype used ethically, if you want to use the word hype, which normally has a negative connotation, hype used ethically is massive enthusiasm for what you're selling, hype used unethically is lying, bullshitting, misleading, exaggerating things that simply aren't true. And I literally revolt against bad marketers that are misleading people because I think cruel optimism, I can't remember the woman's name who coined that term, cruel optimism where you're promising a million to people and it ain't going to come true.
False hope is terrible. It hurts people, right? And so with Abundance, my job with helping to put that book on New York Times with Peter, your book, was to basically look at all of the parts of it and influence people in the things that were significant.
Like think of people, because Tommy not only spends a tremendous amount on marketing, but he's trying to not only help build a better home service professional and help his clients, but he's also wanting to show them how to package themselves to get people to be attracted to you, to do business with you, not just clients for home service, but hiring technicians and building the right culture. So for 20 years, I got all this resistance when I would talk about selling and marketing because people have all had bad negative experiences.
People love to be sold. They hate to be pressured or people that are lying to them.
So I say it today, like think of selling is influence. Think of marketing is storytelling.
If you're more influential, you're going to do a better job with anything. It doesn't need to be even money involved.
It could be with your kids. It could be with yourself and think of marketing is storytelling.
You know, tell a story that enrolls people, not something that bores the shit out of them. And I think we wake up every day and do a sales job to ourselves.
You're going to do the hardest thing in the morning. You have to do a bit of a sales job.
You have to influence yourself. And you've learned why that is so important.
The 4%. By the way, the other thing is, why do I want to go bed to desk that quickly? Because I got to do the hardest thing.
And if I start thinking about what I have to do, right, I could get into my head. I could like paralysis by analysis, right? Exactly.
So like one of the reasons is, I mean, look, one of the reasons I'm going bed to desk is I'm a creative and I want to be in flow. You wake up with your brain in alpha and flow is at the alpha theta borderline.
It's a slower brainwave. So when you wake up, it goes up to beta.
It's a fast moving brainwave. So like you're actually more than flow prone first thing in the morning.
Most people, it's totally killed because the minute they look at their phone, the minute that dopamine, that anticipation, that curiosity, that fear, you've just blown it. It's just gone.
Right. So like I'll do it sometimes too.
This is the classic Steven fuck up. I'll put something on the Insta Google tweet face that's getting a lot of attention yesterday.
I'll wake up in the morning and while my coffee's brewing, I'll be like, oh, let's check the post because I've got like two minutes. Yesterday's good fortune will lure me back.
That's the one where that's the trap I'll get caught on. Cause I want the good feeling.
I want that. Like, I want that little bit of a rush.
That's what I'm going after. And it's stupid.
It's a, it's false hope. And I've, you know, I've learned not to do it at all, but that's the one that'll, that'll screw me up.
I was we'll close out here soon. I was reading an article about Elon Musk and it said a guy that works really, really close to him for a long time, probably over a decade, they said his ability, most people take two weeks to make a decision, like a big, big decision.
These big decisions, he makes them 30 minutes. He walked into the Twitter location and they said, you can't move out of this building and all these restrictions.
And he said, we just unplug. We'll see if Twitter goes down.
He unplugged all the servers. It stayed up.
He just, this idea of making decisions quickly. And what I find is when I'm stressed and I have anxiety, it's because I'm lacking the ability to make decisions quickly.
Like there's something festering. So the more I listen to that good voice, that hard voice that says, no drinking, get your sleep, go in the cold plunge, do your long walk, the easier it is to do harder things that day.
It's like it starts to compound and it starts to get easier. Well, that's the flow.
I always tell the people this. So in our country, right? In our country is a diary essentially, right? It's I took on an impossible challenge at age 53.
I decided I was going to teach myself how to park ski, train park skiing, which is supposed to be impossible for a bunch of different reasons over the age of 25, 30. And I've been reading all these studies on what we now know about aging.
And I was like, well, wait a minute, all this stuff, I mean, like 5,000 papers said I should be able to do this. But nobody ever, though, common perception wasn't as possible.
But that book is written as a diary. Why is it written as a diary? In a sense, like it goes day by day through that season.
It's because the hardest challenge I have with our clients, really with anybody who I'm talking peak performance with, is peak performance is exactly what you just said, Tommy. It's compound interest, right? You get a little bit farther ahead today, a little farther ahead tomorrow, right? But it's so much, I mean, flow massively amplifies it.
We found that like people can get into a couple of micro flow and maybe a macro flow state a day. So you've got like three sort of like 90 minute blocks where you're like 500% more productive than you normally are.
And that sure, maybe it's like one extra thing you're getting done on your to-do list a day, but you get through a week of that, it's five extra things that you've done that the next guy hasn't done. I always tell people that all this stuff is like, it's a little bit at a time, but if I'm doing five extra things a week, it's one a day, I'm getting five a week.
It's 20 a month. Multiply it out by a year, right? It's why sometimes I remember when I first sort of like came into like the peak performance space and you'd meet top performers and you'd see what like in a year, they would like, we'd start at the same place and they would be like 17 miles ahead of me.
And I was like, how the hell, what is it? It's compound interest. Yeah's just, it's right.
So that's, I mean, that's the other reason, like, why do I stick by the clear goals list? Why am I always going to like walk my dog and get my exercise and get my seven to eight hours? It's all that stuff. Cause ultimately I, you know, Stuart Brand once said only enduring happiness is the satisfaction of a job well done.
And I kind of like, I agree, like long-term, what sticks with me, right? What sticks with me? Like, what are the things I'm deeply proud, proudest of? I'm deeply proud of my marriage. I've been married for 20 years.
It's fucking hard to be married for 20 years. That was a sort of a, there were years where it was a daily struggle to stay in that marriage and make it work.
I'm really proud of the 14 books. Each one of those took a year to three years to like, whatever.
Like, those are the things I'm really proud of. All the like little bits.
Like when I work, I work with an editor and we'll do a marathon session. I'll be like, oh, I've got another chapter, but we've been working for like four hours.
You's call it what you should be like. You're not going to remember this later.
You're not even going to know this tomorrow. You're not even going to remember that we put an extra half an hour in and you felt shitty.
You're just going to remember that you got the work done. Do you care about the shitty feeling that's only temporary? Or do you want the...
And I'm like, oh, okay. Yeah.
Well, of course we're going to put the extra half an hour. It's not even, it's a no brainer.
Like it wants you. And I think most people are this way.
They just don't know how to weigh their choices properly based on their actual happiness. I'll give you another example.
This is a exercise I do when I train people in peak performance aging and it shocks me. So one of the things I do is I make people write down their 10 favorite feelings on earth, right? Not your favorite activities, your favorite feelings, because you get slightly different things.
So I'll give you an example. When I made this list for the first time, laughing with my best friend ended up like being number two on my list.
If you were asking me what my favorite activities are, laughing with my best friend would have not made the list, right? That like, I wouldn't have, it wouldn't have come to me that way. So what I tell people is you want to massively increase the quality of your life, make a top 10 list of your 10 favorite feelings, and say no to everything that's not on the top 10 list.
Because why would you waste time on your 27th favorite activity or favorite feeling when you could actually go get more of the top 10? If you're trying to go for like quality of life, that's a really simple metric. It's a really simple way to sort of like map things out.
My problem with that, just thinking about that is like, I do not really get a whole, I get satisfaction when I get out of the cold plunge, but I don't love the feeling when I first get in. And I don't love the feeling of sitting in that sauna past 17 minutes.
I don't love the feeling, a lot of the feelings. 17 minutes.
17 minutes. He's basing this on some type of research.
I don't know what it might be. Because I've heard the ideal time is like 18 minutes.
But in what temperature? I said about 135. Yeah, it was.

17 minutes at 135.

Really?

Sweden or Switzerland or where the hell. Well, you know,

cold plunging is three to five minutes.

I got random funny stories

as we're talking.

So this is just random.

But so I opened

at the biggest, biggest

business conference in Europe for Obama.

And the guy who was interviewing

Obama on stage,

I think we were in Sweden. I want to say it was the guy who used to run IKEA.
I could be wrong. It might have been a different company, but saunas are like the natural national culture once you get into like Sweden, Norway.
Oh, yeah. Right.
The guy spent the first 10 minutes of the interview with Obama. Mind you, 75,000 people in the, like we're in like a stadium.
And then there are like millions watching online. He's got Obama for, I don't know, half an hour.
the first 10 like we're in like a stadium and then they're like millions watching

online he's got obama for i don't know half an hour the first 10 minutes for trying to get

convinced obama to take a sauna with him it was the funniest thing i've ever seen was trying to

watch a president get out of like getting into a sauna with some strange dude he's never met before

especially if you're not don't grow up in a sauna culture like hey let's go take a sauna together

is not really the line you want you want out of present. One of the funnier things I've ever seen.
So what were we talking about? Right. Prior to like saying, no, no, like 10 favorite feelings.
You said laughing with your best friend. And now that's, that's something you do.
And that's not per se. Well, are you saying write down the things you like, evoke the feelings of joy or engagement? Whatever.
I mean, I just found that laughing at my best friend, I also found there were a couple things on my list that I was like, oh. Give us some examples.
Well, I mean, so here's the biggest frame for me, and this is the biggest. The number one on my list was powder skiing, and here's what really blew my mind about this.
This is sort of one of the things that led me to start looking. Flow is very involved in successful age.
So like everybody who studied flow, including, you know, I took something out about one of my mentors, but the end of their life, his career, he was working, everybody's working on this adult development in the second half of your life. And flow is one of the big drivers of adult development.
So it's how we do this successfully. So that's where this knowledge came from.
But years ago, I made this list. And number one was powder skin.
And I realized at the time, great powder days show up seven times a year. And or maybe they show up 10 times a year, but I only managed to like get to the mountain six or seven times a year.
So let's say I got there seven times a year. And at the time I was doing this calculation, I want to say I was 50, 57 now.
So average men are going to live to 82, right? That's on average. So let's just say it's average.
I had 32 more. 32 years.
She had about 210 times. Exactly.
So I realized, well, I've got all these whiz bang friends who are doing longevity shit. So maybe I get an extra 10 years, right? So maybe we can say it's 40 years and I get to do my favorite activity 280 times more period.
If everything works perfectly, that's not a very big number. No, right.
It's really not a big number. So what's better take advantage.
You know what I did? I put a giant countdown clock on the wall in my office. It shows powder stays till death.
So I'm always like, is really a way of focusing my attention on like what matters. And it also like what it does is it stops me.
I'm a workaholic like, like us. And I, a lot of my satisfaction and enjoy comes from that.
So I don't take a lot of time off. And oftentimes when I do take time off, it's because I've said yes to somebody.
Hey, Steven, do you want to come to the Genius Network thing and hang? Right? Like it's those kinds of things. So that list of 10 things allows me to filter.
It's like a vision board. What do I say yes to? What do I say? No.
Yeah. That was a framework.
How do I say no to delicious things? Yeah. And everything you say yes to, like we've talked earlier, everything you say yes to, you say no to something else.
If you say yes to this interview right now, we're saying no to everything else we can do during that time. And every, and Tommy has to make that decision every day.
You have to do it. And so I think, you know use with the million-dollar racehorse, which is if you had a million-dollar racehorse, and every time that horse ran a race and won, you'd make a million dollars.
Then the question is, well, how would you get there? You would have the best trainers. You would have the best nutrition plan.
You would have the rest, rejuvenation, relaxation. You wouldn't have the horse up until 3 a.m.
watching porn, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol. You would not have the horse hanging out with loser horses.
You'd have the horse in the right races. The race selection of where you put your time, attention, money, effort, and energy is critical.
So the key is the million-dollar racehorse in a flow state is a badass. The million-dollar racehorse not in a flow state is a life of pain, angst, and just not winning.
Right. So I think this whole conversation accumulates with how do you win? How do you, you know, and I say, this is a joke to young people and it's kind of funny.
And I almost do it to remind myself is like, if I would have known being successful was this much work, I would have stuck with being a loser. So, you know, Nvidia, the CEO says, if I would have known business as hard, there's no way I'd do it again.
Yeah. And at the same time, I say that funnily, but I'm actually kind of like, you're glad you wrote the 14 books.
You're glad that so it's, it's like Somerset Maude, I think said, I don't like writing. I like having written.
Yeah. I like writing.
The famous one is, is Hillary as Sir Evan Hillary. There are people who like climbing Everest and there are people who like having climbed Everest.
Yeah. Right? And by the way, I might have misquoted something, because I think that it may or may not be Somerset Mudd that said it, because I know my buddy Stephen Pressfield says that Somerset Mudd also, I think, said it's not the writing that's hard, it's sitting down to write that's hard.
But just so. I mean, to me, like, I love the writing.
What's hard is the fact that the fact that when the book is finished, the job is only half done.

The marketing of the book is equally difficult and takes the exact...

Usually, if it takes me four years to write a book, it's going to take about four years to promote it.

This is one of the things people don't get about books is they're not like TV shows.

It's not like a new album and everybody's going to go home and listen to the song in four minutes. They take a while.
You were talking yesterday about you're a slow reader. One of my new books comes out and you're a good friend of mine and you like my work a lot.
I know you're not going to read it with, it's going to take six months to a year before you actually get through my book. I know when I put a book out that it's going to take six years to percolate through the world minimum.
And I've got a, like, that's my marketing window, right? So however long I wrote it, I'm still like working for that book for an equally long period. So I go to this question, who, not how, when somebody says it's impossible, I say, if I gave you a hundred million dollars and I you access to 100 of the most, the best specialists in this, I would not say, I called you all the time, who's the best at this? And I paid for access.
I mean, literally, if you take money out of the equation, it's like, why would you not go? If you want to learn how to surf, why not go with the best that knows how to get you from zero to zero the quickest? I think a lot of people that go, they want to say no, because they say it's just not possible.

And if you get the right people around you, like if you got the best marketer in the world that's known for doing books, they only work with three clients a year. You can probably get that time from four years down to three.
Oh, yeah, yeah, you can definitely do it. I will also say, like, one of the things that really shaped me was my friendship with Peter.

Because I've known Peter since... We were both in our 20s when we met.
And the XPRIZE, I met Peter right when he founded the XPRIZE. And I won't go into this.
There's a long story. But at this point, everybody in the world thought Peter was full of shit.
And because of this weird experience i'd had where i'd had a lot of access right before i met peter a bunch of aerospace engineers who all told me what peter was saying was possible and they were all sort of like rebel misfits engineers so like the mainstream was saying what peter was saying was impossible with this whole group and i was like these guys know what they're talking about because i watched them i watched them drive a car through the sound there sound barrier. And that's harder than putting a spaceship into space.
So I was like, okay, this thing is possible. So I met Peter.
And the first time I met him, he was like, he doesn't tow this line now. And he didn't very, very quickly after the Express got found.
But he was like, we're going to take down NASA. It was this crazy, impossible dream..
And yet eight years later, Branson went into space. So like, I really got to live through, like, I watched my buddy Peter up in the space frontier and like everybody else looked at Peter as like, oh my God, some kind of God.
And I was like, no, no, he's just my friend. He's just like a dude.
He's like all the skiers I knew back in Squaw. Like if we lionize people, like if you're, if you're a skier and action sport athlete, like you lionize people like Shane McConkie or Dean Potter, like the folks I wrote about in The Rise of Superman.
But like they're goofy fuck ups when you met them back. You know what I mean? They put their pants on the same way as everybody else.
I've met very few people who would actually qualify for the term genius. And most of the ones I've met are not particularly good at business or they can't really function in the world.
I've met a handful of geniuses who can actually like they're good enough at like being a genius and business that they can pull it off. But very few.
Right. Very few.
I'll tell you what. A lot of people confuse a genius is simply redundancy and keep at it, keep at it, keep at it until there's a skill development, until like the compound interest thing that you mentioned.
And like, let's say, you know, Branson swooped in a week before the XPRIZE flight, the first one flew, and he licensed the technology. So he didn't even create it, right? He just licensed it, right? And it was created through this grandiose dream to see if you can pull something off.
And the world advances on the backs of its neurotics is something my buddy Gary Halbert would say. I had this crazy opportunity because I wrote the very first giant the first big article on the XPRIZE.
So I interviewed all the original XPRIZE teams. Like there was a Chinese team that was building a rocket out of wood.
There was like, they were doing really nuts, nuts stuff. I mean, now you look at Bezos and you look at France and you look at Elon and you think, well, those guys know what they're doing.
Like it was, it was a free for all when the XPRIZE got first announced. So it was even more amazing that it got won because when you actually sat down with like, it was like 20 of the wild eyed boys from free cloud that were going to go to the mood.
And what's amazing about it is it's a billion dollar industry, trillion dollar industry. It's going to be a trillion dollar industry pretty soon.
Yeah, no, exactly. That's why I bought the domain name spaceuniversity.com like 12 years ago, because I knew it was going to be a big thing one day.
Still haven't done much with it yet. So let me say this last thing, because I know we need to wrap about space.
When I went to the Mojave airport, which I've been to twice, which is like the Silicon Valley of space travel, Stu, who's no longer the, he used to run it, used to be the CEO or whatever his title was there, but he ran it. He said, we give people permission to come here and die.
And he was telling that to a whole room on the 10th year anniversary of, you know, XPRIZE when they won. And he said, what I mean is that, you know, people are going into something.
If you're going to explore this, they're going to die. And if they don't have permission to come to a place where they can do that, the world is never going to advance in this particular area.
So all that being said, how would we take everything related to flow? Because there are people that are watching this. Tommy recruits them.
He's helping them in all kinds of different ways. What are the things that, this could be a very dangerous area, but I think if you live a life without knowing anything about flow, there's a lot of joy you're missing out on.
And so I think what we've discussed here is it's such an important area of not only human performance and betterment, but just connectivity and feeling freaking amazing in your life. And what did you not mention that should have been mentioned just to wrap this up? And you can find all this in my book, The Art of Impossible, and you can get more formal training.
You can probably find this in a million different podcasts with me. When it comes to flow, flow itself, there's really only two things to know.
What are those flow triggers and how do I just deploy them? And then this is the other thing we were talking about earlier. Flow is a cycle.
Starts with a struggle phase, and there's a release phase, and there's the flow state itself, and then there's a recovery phase on the back end. That's your map, right? You got to know where you are on the map and what's your toolbox and your flow triggers.
So like, oh, I'm in struggle. Okay, what are the triggers that are good here? Oh, I'm in release.
What are the triggers that are good here? Oh, it's flow. How do I sustain that for longer? What are the triggers good here? Oh, this is recovery.
Well, how do I maximize my recovery? I mean, like, that's all you really need to know to do this. It's not a whole lot.
And depending on like what your field is and what your work environment is, you know what I mean? Like those triggers are really, they're fairly easy to deploy. And the other thing I always tell people this with peak performance, because it's biologically hardwired, I always think of people who come to the Flow Research Collective to train with us.
I always say, I don't have a vertical. I've got a horizontal.
My customers fit a horizontal. People who come to me are usually top 30% in their field and they want to be top 5%.
That tends to be who comes my way. I always tell people, you can't get top 30% of your field, top 40% of your field without doing this stuff because there's no secret weapon.
There's just your biology. You're doing this shit anyways.
What you don't realize is there's a map. There's an order.
Somebody's done the homework for you. You can hire a guide for this shit.
You don't have to reinvent the wheel here because the neurobiology and the advances we've made in brain science over the past 20 years has allowed us to map it. And if we wanted to, tell me a little bit about Zero to Dangerous.
So you actually train this. So no, there's a bunch of different ways you can train.
I do a Flow for Writers course, which is everything. Flow for Writers is my favorite course to teach because it started out as a way for thought leaders to write books.
Guys that do themselves who wanted to write books. And I think I'd probably help with more books on the New York Times, but I sell this to anybody else this time.
But it's broadened out to anybody. If you want to write sales copy, you want to advertise and copy, marketing copy, blogs, communication of any kind, it's widened out.
So that is an actual live in-person event that I train. When is it? And the next one is in the end of October.
So stephencottler.com and just click training. And that's how you find Flow for Writers.
And we do it live a couple of times a year. And then there's a digital version if that's what you want to go with.
But that's if you want to train with me live. The two ways to train with me live is that.
And the other thing is I actually come in and when we work with businesses, the way we usually work with companies is I'll come in and I'll train the C-suite. We can go out and train every one of your teams in every location you possibly want and I'll send my coaches out.
But I'll train up the C-suite. The interesting thing about working with businesses is when you analyze the companies that are best at this, who's really good at flow? Amazon's good.
Google's pretty good. Toyota's great.
Patagonia. There are these 28 flow triggers.
When you dig under the hood, you realize that most businesses, and I'm sure your business is this way, and I'm sure your business is this way. We did the analysis.
You would find this. You focused on one or two flow triggers.
It's not the full menu. You may be aware of the full menu, but you're like, and usually it's the flow triggers that sit in between your strengths, your organizational strengths, and your organizational values.
So usually when I work with companies, when we go in and most companies know what their values are because they got a mission statement. And if you're a good company, you have your leadership qualities that you already like.
So you have both of those. You know what your strengths are and you know, and if you don't know what your strengths are, I always tell people this is really easy.
Think about your five favorite employees. List five traits that they have and look for the ones that they have in common.
They're probably going to have one or two in common, and those are your strengths. So look for a flow trigger that sits in between your strengths and your values.
And here's the cool thing. Flow triggers.
So we talked about challenge, skills, balance of novelty, complexity, unpredictability, these are other flow triggers. Google is great with the challenge, skills, balance, because anytime you're emphasizing continual learning, which is what Google does, that's the challenge, skills, balance.
That's how we learn. You walk up the challenge, skills, balance.
So they're really big on that. Or Google's also big on autonomy.
That's another flow trigger that they leverage.

And autonomy.

So this is interesting to know, but autonomy and attention are coupled systems in the brain. So if you're not actually in charge of your own life and making your own decisions, you can't maximize focus.
So Google gets at this really easy, 20% time. The classic Google, like if you work at Google, you spend 20% of time on a project that improves Google, but is aligned with your values.
That's like autonomy. That's a flow trigger.
What we've discovered is culture matters so much. We've been talking a lot about this, and a lot of the question is, how do you instill a culture? How do you build the culture you want to build? What we found is that flow triggers turn strengths into values.
So if you want to build a culture and you've got organizational strengths, figure out the flow triggers that are going to link to the values you want. And that's how you actually do that.
That's how most companies do that. It's just, this is the biology underneath it.
And like all we've done is just sort of like looked at what worked. This is how I...
I was training companies for a while. And it was okay.
We were good. We weren't great.
And I was like, why are we not great? Why are we not great? What's fucking hard about this? And so I did a giant... I'm going to white paper it out at some point.
I did this giant study on all the companies that were best at it. And I was like, oh, I don't need to train companies on like 28 flow triggers and all this other stuff.
I literally need to figure out what are the two triggers that sit in between strength and values. And then we do active recovery, distraction management, and a couple other things.
And I can literally half day, full day. And it's a blast.
I do it myself because the results have been so good. It's so fun to lead the workshops.
Yeah. Awesome.
I love this. Well, listen,

I really appreciate you guys

coming in today. This was a great

podcast. We went about

two hours and ten minutes, according to Giuseppe.

Yeah. I'm just

tagging along. I'm giving him a ride

because he stayed in my place. I love it.

Nah, it's genius.

I can sum it all up. Literally,

remove the distractions,

do the hard things first, set small goals that compound into massive goals that have changed your life. And when you reflect back, it's the big things that you got done.

And there's so much more and so many details to sum up this two hours, but I really appreciate

both of you. It was really fun.
Appreciate you. Yeah.
Fantastic. Awesome.
Wish everyone the very

best and go get yourself in flow. Get yourself in flow.
Thanks, guys. Thank you.
It was really fun. Appreciate you.
Yeah. Fantastic.
Awesome. Wish everyone the very best and go get yourself in flow.
Get yourself in flow. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. Hey there.
Thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy.
I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization.
It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets to help me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast

and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time

on the podcast.