The Secret to Beating Burnout | Steven Kotler

25:30I don't have children. I don't really like children. I don't like your children. Sometimes I don't like people who have children. No, but my point is I have a lot of people on my staff who do have children, even though I've tried to talk them out of it. But I'm cautious as I approach a question because I like to know what I'm talking about before I answer it. But what I will, what I can speak to is certainly we evolved in certain kinds of environments. And the evidence is overwhelming that access to nature is important for optimism, is important for a good mood. In fact, by the way, when you are looking at a wide vista, as you get in nature, if you're looking at a mountain range, peripheral vision, when we look out the corners of our eyes, it calms us down automatically.

26:19It activates the parasympathetic nervous system, and it makes us more creative for a number of different reasons. I can't speak to children and what we should be doing in schools. I don't, I, that's just not an area I'm comfortable extending myself in, but should everybody be doing this? Children and adults? Yeah. All you need to know is a 20 minute walk in the woods outperforms all the SSRIs on the market. That right. Plus the fact that it enhances creativity, plus the fact that it enhances quality of life, plus the fact that it enhances mood. In my experience, peak performers, any field, doesn't matter what demand you're in, are too busy to solve problems one at a time.

27:01You look for multi-tool solutions. You want a solution that will solve six or seven problems at once because you're too busy. Going outside is a huge multi-tool solution. You can, right, you got exercise, benefits there. You've got enhanced creativity, benefits there. You've got to enhance mood benefit there. You probably are going to enhance innovation. We know novelty, complexity, unpredictability, which are three things that are built into the natural world. These are all flow triggers. So you're going to get an increased amount of flow and we can go on and on, right? I'm stopping, but I can really do this for the next 10 minutes in terms of the psychological and physiological benefits of being in nature a little bit.

27:45And I also say, I think there is, though this is not in the book, and I'm not advising anybody to do this, but at a personal level, I like those no longer at the top of the food chain moments that you sometimes have in nature, where whether it's doing something access sports wise, where you're really playing with primal forces, gravity, things like that. or I can't tell you how many times I've been hiking a trail, turned a corner and there's a bear or there's a mountain lion or there's an ocelot or right, depending on which country I'm in, or there's a cobra. There's something about when you have that kind of encounter that pits all your day-to-day problems.

28:21Go back to your argument with your wife and your problem at work after you've bumped into a bear or a cobra and perspective is something you suddenly have, right? Like it's really, I find that very useful. And I think for a lot of people who choose to live their life in that way, they would agree with me. I don't think this is something normal. People want anything to do with it. I'm not, you don't need to do this to perform at your best, but I do think it's a not discussed benefit of nature, which is sometimes being in the face of overwhelming power is awesome. It's an amazingly good thing. As the weather finally cools down, I'm swapping in the pieces that actually get the job done.

29:00Warm, durable, and built to last. And Quince delivers every time. Quince has all the false staples you actually want to wear on repeat, like 100 % Mongolian cashmere sweater starting at just 60 bucks, classic fit denim, and real leather and wool outerwear that looks sharp and holds up. I've actually got my eye on their suede trucker jacket. It's perfect for layering, and it hits that balance of casual, but still put together. What I like about Quince is they partner directly with ethical factories and top artisans by cutting out the middlemen. You get premium quality at half the cost of similar brands.

29:32And it's not just clothing. I love their sheets. They have items like bedding and travel accessories. Quince has really become a go-to for me across the board. Same here. Everything I grabbed from Quince has held up and it doesn't wreck my budget. Layer up this fall with pieces that feel as good as they look. Go to quince.com slash charm for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash charm. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash charm. Johnny, remember we started this business? I feel like I was drowning in decisions.

30:09Website design, payment processing, customer management. The overwhelm was real. Every day brought five new problems we have no idea how to solve. Exactly. When you're building something from scratch, you need a partner who's got your back. For millions of businesses, that partner is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 % of all e-commerce in the US from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. Here's what makes it brilliant. Shopify gives you everything. Beautiful, ready to use templates so you don't need to be a designer.

30:44AI tools that write your product descriptions and enhance your photos. Plus build in marketing tools to create email and social campaigns. It's like having an entire team behind you. And the best part, Shopify handles all the complex stuff, inventory management, international shipping, payment processing, you can focus on what you do best. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash charm. That's shopify.com slash charm. Shopify.com Now, I want to talk about these flow triggers because obviously action sports is one domain.

31:28Probably not many in our audience are engaging in action sports. Many people in our audience are struggling a little bit with some social anxiety, frustrated that they can't get in flow with conversations with people in important job interviews or on a great first date. We've all had those moments where we've instantly connected with someone, time has disappeared, and all of a sudden, you can't believe the conversation ended. how can we create those flow triggers or look for those flow triggers to create that state where we lower our anxiety and we allow ourselves to fully feel it? There are 22 known flow triggers.

32:02And the first place we want to start is the simplest flow follows focus. It only shows up when all of our attention is in the right here, right now. So that's what all the triggers do. They drive attention into the present moment. If I were to put this neurobiologically, they do one of three things. They either drive norepinephrine into our system, which is a neurochemical. They drive dopamine into our system, another neurochemical, or they lower cognitive load. Among the functions that dopamine and norepinephrine playing perform is focus. They massively enhance attention. And so, for example, if I put a little bit of norepinephrine and dopamine into your system, that's the cocktail underneath curiosity.

32:39If I crank it up a lot more, that's passion. Think about how much attention you pay to anybody you've ever fallen in love with for free. You didn't have to spend any work. You just couldn't stop looking at them. That's what you get from norepinephrine and dopamine. And cognitive load is all the crap you're trying to think about any one time. And if I lower cognitive load, I liberate a tremendous amount of energy that can be repurposed for the present moment in attention. So that's what all the triggers do. There are 12 on the individual side that'll get me into flow or you into flow. and then there are 10 on the group side.

33:14And there's a lot of overlap between them. And you're asking group flow triggers. So first off, credit where credit is due. I did none of the research into group flows triggers. It was all done by a very brilliant psychologist named Keith Sawyer. He's at the University of North Carolina. And he actually did all this work. This is not in Art of Impossible. I think the story's in a different book of mine. He was an improv jazz player. He was studying with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow psychology at the university of chicago he was a jazz musician and he started to notice jazz musicians would get into these group flow experiences and he wanted to study it more and he teamed up with second city television which is the improv theater troupe comedy troupe that feeds into saturday live and a whole bunch of other stuff like that has for years and for 15 years he was their jazz musician he would accompany their performances on the piano and film them and did frame by frame analysis basically like he could tell when the performers were in group flow because the level of audience laughter went through the roof.

34:15Like the performance, everybody came together, everybody's laughing. So you can check for that on the like soundtrack and say, okay, the hell was going on? And he like went frame by frame for 15 years and he came up with these 10 triggers. So what you're looking for are those group flow triggers. And you'll notice that a lot of what I'm going to talk about, it's going to sound like stuff you probably had on the show because it's going to sound like stuff that would be covered under psychological safety, for example. There's a tremendous amount of overlap between the group flow triggers, psychological safety.

34:49And in fact, I think the psychological safety discussion would be more informed if they understood group flow triggers, because there's a couple of things in the psychological safety discussion that you want, because it makes people feel safe and secure and is important, but it actually could block good team performance. So we haven't yet negotiated some of this stuff. And some of it's like really obvious stuff. When you're building a team, you want people of equal skill levels, roughly, for the simple reason that if you're going to play basketball, there's five guys on the team and your point guard's never played before and your power forward is Carl Malone, you've got a problem.

35:26Carl's not going to be in flow and the poor, right? Or for those of you who aren't as old as me, I'm trying to think of a power forward. I was reaching into the memory banks. I don't know why. We'll go with LeBron for the younger audience. I was going for Draymond. That's what I was getting stuck at. I couldn't come up with the second half of his name. Like Dre, Dre, Dre. What's his name? Dre. We want equal level of skill. You need familiarity, for example. And that means I understand your tics, your tendencies, your language, right? You need common language. These are really important things.

36:03But the most important group flows triggers is yes and, which is the first rule of improv, right? If you come up to me and you're like, yo, Steven, there's a blue elephant in the bathroom. And I go, shut up. No, there's not. That's not funny. It's not stories going nowhere. But if I say, oh crap, I hope he's not using up all the toilet paper. I really got to go right now. We can roll into something that's even mildly amusing, at least in my head. But my point is, and this doesn't by the way, mean, because if you're familiar with the science of brainstorming, that like just loving everybody's idea and going kumbaya is a lousy way that gives you group thing.

36:42It doesn't give you innovation. So yes, hand is not about kissing everybody's butt. It's about finding something in the idea that you can be additive to. I can say almost everything you said, I'm not really down with, But the thing you had about Marshall amplifiers and fuzzy headed purple dowels, I am really into that. That's going to go somewhere. You can do it that way. And I also, I just want to say this because I didn't get to say it earlier. There is a lot of anaclytical flow. It is a misnomer that flow. When Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who was the godfather of flow research, started doing this work, he was trying to figure out why life is meaningful.

37:27And he was studying people in leisure activities. So he was looking at art and athletics. And so everybody went, oh, this must be for artists or athletes. In fact, he's got a new textbook on flow and education that just came out. And in the opening to the textbook, he says the same thing. He's, yeah, I made this mistake at the beginning. I was looking at it in this very specific framework. I work with accountants. We train 1 ,000 people a month at the Flow Research Collective. 90 % of them are C-suite executives. That's the vast majority of them. And usually our specialty is often super overstressed, burned out.

38:10I was a peak performer and then I got super burned out and lost it. Like we get, we train so many of those people or our second largest population. And this is just this year. We, but it changes is powerhouse women in their forties and fifties who took time off to raise a family and are coming back and want, like they did some other job. Then they raised their family and they got a taste of, oh, this is what passion feels like, okay, let's bring that into the workplace. How do I find that? How do I do that? Those are the vast majority of people we work with, and a lot of them are very analytical jobs.

38:43And so flow in those environments is really common. It's a really a misnomer that it's just for athletes and for artists. Yeah, I've certainly fallen into that myth myself, looking for it in my personal life. I think that brings up another interesting side of this, which I wanted to talk about, obviously everyone understands peak performance and we would love to operate at our optimal best. Right now, we're living in a time where many of us are feeling burned out and less access to nature, less access to everything that was creating this opportunity for us to find flow. So for those in our audience who are facing burnout and looking to jumpstart and get back to where that performance was, and obviously you do this professionally with C-suite executives, what can we do, number one, to identify that it's a state of burnout?

39:34Because I think many of us are walking around in a fog, not realizing that it could be burnout. There are very clear identifiable symptoms for burnout. I think it's a recognized disorder at this point. Irritability is really high on the list. When I know I'm burned out, it's always the feeling of, oh my God, I'm going nowhere. I'm working really hard and the quality of work is, I can't, it doesn't matter when I'm burned out, doesn't matter how many times I write a paragraph, it's still shit. I can rewrite it a hundred times, a hundred different ways, and they're all crap. There are precise neurobiological reasons for that.

40:09And there's really good burnout diagnostics online, which is where I would, for free. So I'll send people to there. Let's talk about the second half of the question, which is what the hell do you do about it? And so here, and this is really stuff I cover in Art Impossible under what I call the positive psychology basics. So positive psychology has spent 30 years identifying about six things, three on the physical side, like this is what you need to do for energy and three on the mental side. This is what you need to do to manicure your brain and turn down anxiety and calm the fuck down. They're really not negotiables, but they're not all that arduous and there's options.

40:49So like on the physical side, there's three things that I think sit there. One is, and this is the first thing you can do if you're burned out, is sleep. We human beings need seven to eight hours of sleep a night. You cannot perform at your best without seven to eight hours of sleep at night. There's no way around it. There's no other options. There are occasionally people who can function unless sleep for bits and periods and whatever. But if you're interested in reliable, repeatable, consistent peak performance. And I always tell people a couple of things you need to know right off the bat about peak performance.

41:21One, peak performance is nothing more than getting your biology to work for you rather than against you. There's no secret secret. There's nothing. There's just your biology. And it's just getting it to work for you. And then again, not a new idea. A hundred years ago, William James says in the first psychology textbook ever written, he says, the great thing then in any education is to make your nervous system your ally instead of your enemy, right? This is not new information. There's just our biology and it works a specific certain way. And you just, there's no way around this one. And we're designed to function with seven, eight hours of sleep a night.

41:57You need that to function physically. If you start looking at the list of, we talk about multi-tool solutions, right? Sleep is, sleep solves so many problems. It's insane to cut back on that. Second thing on the physical side, we're not going to linger here, about nutrition and hydration. Eat good food, drink plenty of water, enough said, right? And then the final thing, this is often talked about as this positive psychology basic, but the people put it on the cognitive side and there's a mistake there. And I'll explain in a minute, which is social support. Chris Peterson, a brilliant positive psychologist at the University of Michigan says you can sum up 30 years in positive psychology in one phrase, which is other people matter.

42:36We are social creatures. We're hardwired. The reasons on the energy side and everybody's had this experience, but you get in a fight with your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your boss, your sister, your mom, and then you try to go to work. How well can you focus? How much energy do you have? It's impinging on you physically. What people also don't realize is anytime you encounter a challenge, a problem, anything, your brain does an instantaneous risk assessment. And part of that risk assessment is, do I got posse? Because if you got to solve problem alone, that's a big problem. Could be. But if you've got six or seven friends, family backing you up, lesser problem.

43:18Even if they're not immediately with you and you get fired at work, you know somebody's going to feed you and put a roof over your head if this podcast thing doesn't work out so well for you guys. Hopefully, yeah. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed. What I always tell people, and this is important, is under normal conditions, you can usually screw up one a day, right? Like you can't do it every day. You got to get them right a bunch, but you can screw up one a day and like still probably perform at your best. You can't get enough sleep, but you've dialed in social support and you've hydrated and you're eating right.

43:50You probably can power through and do it. Under stress conditions, which is the question you asked, I don't think you can screw up on any of them. Under what we've been dealing with, whether it's the economy, our COVID, the election, take your pick of everything that we've gone through over the past year and the turbulence it brought to all of us, I don't think we get to skimp on any one of those. I was just going to say, we've now been forced in a position where we're trying to escape what's going on. So we're staying up later watching shows, not really getting the sleep that we need. We're reaching for comfort food and things that maybe aren't as nutritious as we were eating pre-pandemic.

44:27And then on top of it, we've removed the social component from our work. We're on Zoom. We're just quickly having meetings, getting onto the next thing. We're zoned in on our work. We're maybe not seeing family and friends. So it's real easy to see how those three physical things have been drastically impacted by what's going on around us. We're not really realizing it because everyone's going through it at the same time and it's all compounding. Let's shift gears to the other side because that's the part that I think... The other side is important and we'll come back. We're going to come back to your idea in a half a second after we come to the other side because the other side is the cognitive side, right?

45:02And It's how do we deal with the anxiety and so much peak performance, including flow. Too much anxiety, which is actually the same neurochemical, norepinephrine, right? If I give you a little bit, you get curiosity. If I give you a little bit more, you get passion. I give you a little bit more, you get anxiety and worry and all, right? And I give you even more, you're into schizophrenia and other actual real long-term problems. But what do we do to control that? There's three things. a daily gratitude practice. And one, I want to start with the science because when I say gratitude, I mean nothing wishy-washy.

45:39We're not talking about new age, spiritual, anything. We do extensive work with Dr. Glenn Fox at USC, the world's leading expert on the neurobiology of gratitude. Think you're the only one struggling with performance issues in the bedroom? You're not. And now there's an easier way to fix it from home. That's where RexMD comes in. It's an online telehealth service that helps men get real FDA-approved medications straight to your door. Everything's done online. No doctor's office, no waiting rooms, no awkward conversations. Here's how it works. First, share your symptoms, health history, and goals through a short quiz.

46:13Then, a U.S. licensed provider reviews your information and prescribes medication, if appropriate. Your treatment gets sent to you with free two-day delivery. It's that easy. And Rex MD team is there for ongoing care. Just send a message. What I love about Rex MD, total discretion, private consultations, and direct to door delivery in discreet packaging. No pharmacy trips needed. Plus it's care that you can trust. FDA approved medications tailored to individual needs. Over 475 ,000 men have chosen Rex MD with over 50 million tablets prescribed and delivered. This isn't just about performance. It's about feeling secure in yourself and your relationships again.

46:53Don't put your love life on hold. Take back control of your confidence and intimacy. Get up to 95 % off treatment with Rex MD. Visit rexmd.com slash charm. That's rexmd.com slash charm. See full details and usage at rexmd.com. Prescription required. Results may vary. Stephen, before you get into science, I want to set this up really quick for you because we've of course had certainly in our years of podcasting meditation gurus on the show everyone there's plenty of people we even had David Meltzer on a few weeks ago who talked about why gratitude changed his life so in reading your book and I saw the signs I was like yes finally something that we can point to that shows yeah it's because otherwise it's ridiculous right otherwise you're just like this is freaking nuts and why yeah no I totally agree.

47:46And there's two things to know. Like one affirmations, which is the new age spiritual side, literally are disasters. They don't work. And we'll talk about why and gratitude works. And the reason, so the thing you have to understand is that one, we have what is known as a negativity bias. We take in more negative information than positive information. Now we take in 11 million bits of information a second by our senses. This is nothing internal. We also generate a lot of internal stuff, but a guy named Marvin Zimmerman measured it. According to his measurements, it's 11 million bits of information a second.

48:27Consciousness, what you're aware of, what you pay attention to, it's 300 bits of information at once, maybe 2 ,000 bits at max. People have gone back and forth about what the number is. To put that in context, you're listening to me talk that's requiring 60 bits of information. If we're both talking at once, you're up to 120. If we add you, we've maxed everybody out. So somewhere between 120 and 180 is our threshold, but nobody, it's very hard to listen to three people talk at once and process the information. You usually lose somebody. So that's the threshold. So we take in nine negative bits of information for every one positive bit that gets through.

49:07Now, optimism is a huge driver of peak performance. We perform better when we're optimistic. So that's a problem right then and there. Also, novelty is the foundational ingredient in creativity. And if we're taking in nine negative things, most of this shit that's negative is stuff we've seen before, right? Very rarely is the stuff that scares us totally out of the blue. My point is that when you do a daily gratitude practice, this tips the ratio. And a daily gratitude practice is list three things you're grateful for and turn one of them into a paragraph. It's a five-minute practice. Or list 10 things you're grateful for and just really try to feel the gratitude.

49:51And what you do is you tip the brain's negativity bias. You start taking in six to one instead of nine to one or five to one. And this is a huge, huge, huge deal. And the reason gratitude works and affirmations don't work is your brain has a fantastic bolt in bullshit detector. We all know this. You can't lie to yourself. You can lie to almost everybody else, but you cannot lie to yourself for too long. You can't look in the mirror and go, I am a millionaire. I'm a millionaire. I'm a millionaire. If you work at Walmart, your brain goes, dude, shut up. You work at Walmart. And that's massively demotivating, really, really, really demotivating, right?

50:30We're going in the exact opposite direction. So gratitude for one works because it tips the negativity bias a little bit in our favor. And we also know this is work that we did with Glenn is that a regular gratitude practice actually makes you more prone to flow. So it's got a direct correlation with frequency of flow. The next thing is mindfulness, right? You've had guys talking meditation. The thing that I think it's lost is you don't need all that much mindfulness, right? If you're really just going for the cognitive benefits and another, again, mindfulness, respiration, really good multi-tool solution solves a lot of different cognitive issues, emotional regulation, focus, attention, does a lot of good stuff.

51:12But 11 minutes a day of breath work is enough to do it, right? And the final thing you can do for your head is exercise 20 to 40 minutes of exercise and by the way what do you get then you get exercise induced transient hypofrontality the deactivation of the prefrontal cortex we talked about earlier right that's what happens when it gets you work out in the gym it gets quiet upstairs about 20-25 minutes in that's what's happening your prefrontal cortex is deactivating and it's an efficiency exchange literally your brain says oh fuck you need a lot of energy because you're going to need to focus on the treadmill you're running on.

51:48So let's shut off non-critical structures. That's what happens. The point on the cognitive side is five-minute gratitude practice, 11-minute mindfulness practice, or 20 to 40 minutes of exercise. Pick one a day. You don't need to do all three. And in crisis situations, COVID, where we are right now, if you're burned out, et cetera, et cetera, maybe two out of three, Right. For the first in back in March during the lockdown, I was I was exercising every day. I was meditating every day. I was doing gratitude work every day. And I was doing all six, all the sleeping seven, eight hours a night. And they're grit skills in a sense.

52:30Right. We talk about when we train people in recovery, the art of recovery at the Flow Research Collective, which is hugely important. And by the way, if you're burned out, active recovery is the next thing you have to add in. Right. That's the other. Right. We can talk about the cure for burnout in half a second, but these are the six things to start with. There's two things I'd add if you're burnt out, which is we all have what is known as a primary flow activity. This is whatever that thing you did as a kid that just automatically dropped you into flow. Maybe it was dancing to hip hop. Maybe it was coloring.

53:05Maybe it was going to the Natural History Museum and staring at dinosaur bones. Maybe it was skiing in my case or skateboarding in yours. but we all had that activity. And usually as we become adults, it goes away, right? Oh, I've got responsibilities. I've got work. This is the thing we hang up with a couple of things to know. One, flow is essentially a focusing skill. So the more flow you get, the more flow you get. I go skiing on Monday. It means that I'm going to have an easier time getting a flow on Thursday because I'm training my brain how to focus in that way. Also creativity, innovation, massively heightened in flow, 400 to 700%, depending on whose studies you're looking at.

53:45And a work out of Harvard shows that heightened creativity will outlast the flow state by a day, maybe two. So even if you go skiing on Monday or skating on Monday, that heightened creativity, that heightened problem solving, innovation, all that stuff, it could be with you till Wednesday. This is a huge bonus. And it's an enormous, because when we move into flow, So there's a global release of a chemical nitric oxide. It's a gas-sickling molecule. It's everywhere in the body. It completely flushes all the stress hormones out of our system. So it resets the nervous system. If you're burned out, you can't reset your nervous system.

54:22That's one of the reasons you're burned out. So automatizes that. And the other thing that I want to add for the burnout crowd is active recovery. Passive recovery is I worked all day. It's a TV and a beer. And that actually blocks what you want. active recovery, Epsom salt bath, infrared sauna, dry sauna, restorative yoga, a long walk in nature to go back to the earlier topic, right? Gardening, any of these things, these are restorative, active recovery, get a massage, foam rollers, take your pick. But we have found at the Flow Research Collective that if you are sort of paying attention to the positive psychology basics, And I don't mean like your anal, I get it right every single day.

55:07I do all, right? You're just trying to be smart about it. You get regular once a week access to a flow, even if it's just 20 minutes, a half an hour, an hour, and you have an active recovery protocol. We don't have data on this yet, but as far as we can tell, you can't burn out. It seems to be prophylactic against burnout. And I got to use prophylactic in a sentence. So there. especially around burnout, not expecting that. I certainly know for myself with COVID, one of my activities was my social life of performance, of playing music with my band, getting into the rehearsal room. All that was taken from me during COVID.

55:53And AJ knows for me, that was such a large part of my life. I've been playing in bands since I was 15 years old. I love those moments on stage or even just getting in the room with the guys and drifting off for in a sound soundscape for a few hours. Having that taken from me has made me during COVID incredibly irritable, not being able to focus. And I've had to set time just to pick up my guitar. And the times of where I would find myself in rehearsals, I would have to find that time again. And that has been the most difficult part of COVID for myself, having that opportunity taken from me. I will say I worked essentially seven years straight to get to a book that was published last January called Futures Faster Than You Think for a lot of different reasons.

56:47And I was going to literally I worked seven years straight without even a vacation other than going skiing for like half day. I was going to ski all of March, April and May. I was just done. I've had enough. And as soon as Peter and I were like, first day of our book tour was the day COVID hit. So I shut the ski resorts. I got no, for seven years, I was aiming for this, just make it here, just make it here. And so I, one of the founding ideas underneath resilience is setting long-term, is turning current strife into long-term goals. And so what I basically said to myself is the only way I'm going to not go crazy from losing out on the skiing and the access to flow is going to give me was if I could, the goal I set was I needed to enter ski season a better skier than I ended last year.

57:46And so I was like, well, how do I do that? I created this crazy training program that I could do without gyms over the summer. And I also, I added a couple more things into it, but I, I, this isn't really something we talk about in our impossible, but you're bringing it up. I find that with those kinds of challenges, you can long-term goal setting. We don't talk about this a lot. I don't, a little bit in our impossible, but because of how we filter information, because it's this huge 11 million down to 300, what do we filter? What are the filters? Fear is one, obviously. We talked about that. What's the other half?

58:22Goals. That's the other big filter is that our filter on reality is our fears and our goals. We essentially don't live in reality, right? We live in a reality created by our fears and our goals. That's most of the world we're in all the time. And so if you don't have, if you are getting your ass kicked in some way, I can't play music with my band, which is a high flow thing, really fun, blah, blah, blah. I can see all the problems there. I would say, okay, then I'm going to set musical challenges and goals that you can accomplish on your own so that when you come back to it after our vaccines show up, perhaps, that would be my workaround for that because it was the only way I stayed sane.

59:06Nobody was happier to be skiing this week than me. I cannot lift my arm above here because I hit the ground so hard because I was like, just deciding that I was going to, I got better. I learned a bunch of freestyle tricks over on dark. And then I brought them onto snow. And let's just say they didn't all go as planned. I entered the season stronger and better than I finished last season, but there were some errors along the way. Which is completely normal. I did hit the ground rather hard about 50 times two days ago. Now in the setup to the book, everyone understands art of impossible, the capital I impossible, the moonshots and the people that are absolutely extraordinary that we look up to.

59:52But I love this idea of dialing it down to the lowercase i and bringing it into your own life. We've danced around it. We've talked about a few parts of the stack, but I would love as we wrap here to really just cover what this impossible stack is and how we can turn that small i impossible for ourselves with neuroscience into something that we're capable of. There's two ideas here. One we already talked about, which is, peak performance is nothing more than getting your biology to work for you, rather than against you. So there's a limited suite of biological tools that you can use to take on super hard challenges.

1:00:25But I want to go to your point. Thank you for bringing this up, because it's a great point, and it's worth making. We're all familiar with capital I, Impossibles, as you pointed. This is Alex Honnold climbing El Cap. This is Rosa Parks sitting at the front of the bus. This is Einstein and the theory of relativity, right? These are the white Wright brothers. These are the impossible. We're familiar with capital I, impossible, that which has never been done. There's also a small I, impossible, which is that which we believe is impossible for us. And the simple example I gave was when I was growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, right?

1:01:00Blue collar kind of childhood. I wanted to be a writer from the time I was four years. I didn't know any writers. that would be like me waking up one day and being like, okay, I want to be an elf or a dwarf. I think I'd be a dwarf, right? I had no idea. There was no, it was impossible in the reason. What I mean by that is no clear path between point A and B and statistically horribly bad odds of success, but also that's a small lie impossible, but so is rising out of poverty or overcoming deep trauma or figuring out how to get paid doing what you love for a living, right? These are all small I impossible.

1:01:36Small I impossible is that which we believe is impossible for us. That formula is nobody, very few people set out to accomplish capital I impossible. That's not what they set out to accomplish. They set out to accomplish small I impossible. And they do the first one and they're like, oh, wow, I pulled myself out of poverty or I lost a leg or I was raped or whatever it was that was horrifying, I go, what else can I do? What can I do next? What can I do next? What can I do next? And if you accomplish enough small I and possibles, sooner or later, you will start pushing into capital I and possible range, right?

1:02:13It's what happens. The actual formula is actually fairly simple. It's when you're talking about human peak performance, you need the motivation to get you into the game. And motivation is a catch-all, right? When psychologists talk about motivation, they're talking about intrinsic motivation, curiosity, passion, purpose, right? They're also talking about goals and grit. And in a sense, you need the motivation to get into the game. Goals tell you where you're going. Grit keeps you going. Then you need learning, right? Because learning allows you to continue to play. And then you need creativity because that's how you steer, right?

1:02:53That's how you get where you want to go. That's the self-expression we talked about earlier. And finally, you need flow to turbo boost everything beyond all reasonable expectations. And that's literally, the system is designed to work that way, literally in that order, right? Like the system is designed to start with really basic intrinsic motivators, curiosity. Curiosity is designed to be built into passion. Passion is designed to be built into purpose. Once you have purpose, what do you need? Autonomy, another big intrinsic motivator, the freedom to pursue your purpose. Once you're free to pursue your purpose, what do you need now?

1:03:27Mastery, the skills to pursue that purpose. Well, okay, I've got the skills, I got the freedom, what do I need now? I need goals. Where the fuck am I going? It's very commonsensical, and the neurobiology follows the common sense in a sense. That was an awkward sentence, but you get my point. And I want to start at the beginning because we have certainly clients over the years who come to us feeling a lack of curiosity. And it then becomes difficult, obviously, to get on this journey of impossible without that starting point. And in the book, you had a great challenge that I would love to share with our audience around building up this curiosity.

1:04:06I'm going to make it easier for your audience. We're going to send your audience to passionrecipe.com and the whole four prints thing you're going to put people through. We put it up, we built it. A good friend of ours built the coolest interactive PDF for the whole thing. So it's like, we got sexy tech underneath the passion recipe now. It's even better than it is in the book, but yeah, this is how you cultivate curiosity. This is how you turn curiosity into passion. This is how you turn passion to purpose. And certainly this is one of those dividing lines for a lot of people, right? Some people, your music, my skiing and writing, like I've known what I wanted to do since I was four and the puzzle was how to do it.

1:04:47There was no question. Right. Other people are like, oh my God. And, but a couple of things to say here, I say this in the book, but it's, you always have to remember passion on the front end when you're starting, it never looks like passion on the backend, right? I say, what does the passionate athlete look like? And you've got LeBron James, it's the windmill scowl dunk in the finals right over some point guard's head with that scowl on his face that he gets. That's what we think of as passion, right? And we forget that on the front end, passion is just like a little kid in a driveway shooting a ball through a hoop, right?

1:05:25That's what it looks like on the front end. And it looks like that for all of us. And curiosity and the passion, it's a learning process. And as a learning process, the rule is the same. You're going to suck until you don't. Learning is an invisible process. So our experience is, I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck. Oh, wow, I don't suck. And that's everybody in the world's, right? There's my friend, Andrew Eberman, who's a neuroscientist at Stanford. He says the thing that peak performers always know that most people don't know is it's always crawl, walk, run. Most everybody else comes in going, I want a shortcut.

1:06:05I don't want to, I'm not going to crawl. And I'm really not all that interested in walking. Can I jog? I'm going to start out. I'm going to find some way. I'm going to get jiggy. I'm going to start to jog. And peak performers know that it's always all of us. It doesn't matter who you are. You could be best in the world at whatever. When you switch to something new, whatever it is, it could be turning your ass into fashion. It's always crawl, walk, run. And so peak performers just don't waste any time. It's not that they're going to get there faster. It's not that they're faster than you. It's that you're fucking around trying to look for a shortcut.

1:06:39And peak performers are just like, yeah, there are no shortcuts. You learn this the hard way, which I think is incredibly useful when you approach these ideas. You were saying something. I just want to add to that and finding other people who are at your level with skillset to build community to be able to do it together. Because as you said, you can't lone wolf this stuff. You can, but it's very difficult. But if you have others around you who are just excited about this new thing that you all suck at, you can all go out there and suck at it together and have a blast. And for ourselves with our community is pairing up everyone to work on these things that they're all walking into for the first time and having fun with it.

1:07:28And anything that you can surround yourself with other people at that level who are passionate about it or at least curious, you will turn it in the fun. I agree. And by the way, I'm an introvert lone wolf. Like I, that's how I'm wired. Like I really am. My wife is too. Like both of us will spend 14, 15 hours a day by ourselves, not talking to anybody. And I'll go down a writing hall and I won't talk to her. I won't even talk to her much for months on end, but I will say it's right with flow science and researchers. It is more fun and I'm the biggest lone wolf and I love that shit, but it is more fun if you can do it together.

1:08:09We love this line, both of us. Frustration isn't the sign you're moving in the wrong direction. It's the sign you're moving in the right direction. And this dovetails brilliantly. That's a cognitive load issue, right? Like flow is the best we get to feel on the planet, but there's a struggle phase. It starts with struggle. And so this is not in the book. Maybe this is a line, but this is work we're doing right now. Now, it appears that you will always need to at least trigger the fight response to get into flow. So even if it only lasts a second, right, like you're going to have to get gritty and aggressive for just a nanosecond on the front end of flow.

1:08:50So you're not going to ever avoid the struggle. And yeah, I think this is an education comment, right? This is something I do tell parents, which is you have to teach this to your kids. because when I was growing up, I thought when I got frustrated, I couldn't learn something and I was doing something wrong. Exactly. I was like, oh, it's a sign you're going in the right direction. This was also, this is another story in the book that I thought for a really long time until Laird Hamilton set me straight. I thought courage meant not feeling fear. I didn't realize that courage meant, oh, everybody feels this terrible.

1:09:25You just do it anyways. I thought to be courageous, I had to not feel feared. I was like, I don't know how to do that. I'm scared of everything, but I can learn to ignore the fear and go right at it if that's... Yeah. Staring down the fear. And I think that's such an important lesson because there are so many things in life that frustrate us and we drop them. And we don't even get to the state that we could get curious to start the path to flow. We feel frustration and we back away And we say that's for someone else. And we never really push through that. And to realize that's a signal that we're on the right track, not going in the wrong direction.

1:10:02It's even better than that. Like not only is it signaling you're on the right track, there's overwhelming evidence. And David Epstein, who I write about David's work in Art Impossible, he's a friend. He talks about this a lot more in range, but the science is really clear. You cannot predict what you're going to be good at or what you're going to like before doing it. And actually before getting good at it, like literally this is, you can take a perfect, you can go to LeBron James and say, okay, you are obviously a professional athlete. You know, your body's super well. Let's say LeBron's never played highlight, right?

1:10:35Or badminton. And you can say, LeBron, do you think you're going to like highlight or badminton or lacrosse? If he's not played those sports, even with his level of physical prowess, he's not an accurate judge of whether or not he's going to like it or be good at it, which is crazy, but it seems to be true. So you can't like your frustration is a sign you're moving in the right direction. And honest to God, until you get past the frustration, you have no idea if you're going to like it or be good at it. For me, that's golf. And when I think about professional athletes as they retire, trying to take up golf and seeing just how frustrated Charles Barkley was over the weekend, we look at athletes and we assume that things just come naturally to them, that frustration was not a part of that journey at all.

1:11:20And I love that you point that out. Yeah. Laird Hamilton and I talk about something else that's very similar along those lines, which is, he has said this to me, people see me on a 50 foot wave or a hundred foot wave, and they think, oh, I could never fricking do that. That's impossible. I could never do that. What they didn't see is three-year-old me on a three-foot wave and four-year-old me on a four foot wave and five-year-old me on a five foot wave, right? People look at that and go, oh my my God, that's crazy. That's impossible. And for him, a week ago, he surfed a 49 and a half foot wave.

1:11:52So what he's doing today is it's a half a foot harder for him, but everything else is completely invisible to you. And so you don't see that and you miss all of that stuff. Now we have the technology and the videos for all of these athletes. I always think about Tony Hawk. We basically have watched his career from 13 years old, which is just remarkable. Now, we love to ask every guest what their X factor is, what sets them apart, skill set and mindset to make them successful. Obviously, locking yourself up for seven years to write a book, a few things about your own X factor. How would you define your X factor?

1:12:36People will tell you, I'm willing to outwork anybody. buddy. I just always assumed that I wasn't the smartest guy or the most talented guy, but I don't get into anything. If I can't try to be best in the world, if I'm going to do it, I want to be best in the world. I want to try to be best in the world. Otherwise I don't get involved. So they'll say that I, if you actually ask me, I think what I, the, my X factor is everything I've done has, I it's because I think macroscopically very well. I, so I can think very, very, very broadly. When I was a journalist, I was what was known as a big think writer, which sounds fancy, but it means I work at the intersection of subjects.

1:13:17You want to crawl down a money trail? I'm not your guy. That's a different kind of thing. But if you want to know where does politics and religion and action sports intersect and go find a story there, I'm your guy. And it's because I think naturally at a systems level. So thinking microscopically was very difficult for me. I have to know the big picture framework before I can understand it. And I don't know if that's an actual skill or the fact that I was interested in things like systems analysis and evolution and how rainforests work and those kinds of questions that forced you to learn to think that way.

1:13:56So I don't know which, if it was natural or came first, that and the fact that I love to read. Books are where they keep the secrets, folks. I love that saying. And we would love our audience to read your latest, The Art of Impossible. Thank you so much for joining us. This is such a pleasure. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you, guys.

1:14:24All right. And this is the part of the show where we celebrate one of our X Factor members. And this week, it is David. Take it away, David. Hi, my name is Dave, and I am a senior software engineer. Art of Charm has helped me advance my career because it gave me the confidence and permission to go out and interview. Within four years of taking the program, no joke, 3x my salary. My favorite AOC concept was that I can build my own belief system. I am not tied to the negative doubt and self-talk that was in my head. I can push forward with who I wanted to be. To anybody thinking about joining, I'd say you won't regret it.

1:14:58Just do it. Trust the process, and you'll have the life that you deserve. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure working with you too, and we wish you all the luck in the near future. If you have gotten value out of this or any of our podcasts, could you do us a favor and head on over to your favorite podcast player and rate and review the show? It means the world to us, and it helps others find all the value that you have found. Till next week, go out there and crush it.

1:15:57We'll be right back. Thank you.