Speaker 1: The internal experience of learning for everyone, everybody in the world.
Speaker 2: Is I suck. I suck, I suck, suck, I suck.
Speaker 1: Oh look, I don't suck anymore.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 3: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
Speaker 3: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
Speaker 3: think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
Speaker 3: thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 3: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 3: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 3: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 3: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 3: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 3: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 3: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. We
Speaker 3: hope you'll enjoy this episode from the archive. Thanks for
Speaker 3: joining us. Our guest on this episode is Stephen Kotler,
Speaker 3: a New York Times bestselling author, award winning journalist, and
Speaker 3: the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. Stephen is
Speaker 3: one of the world's leading experts on human performance. He's
Speaker 3: the author of thirteen books, nine of them best sellers,
Speaker 3: including the Art of Impossible, A Peak Performance Primer.
Speaker 4: Hi Steven, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Good to be with you, Eric.
Speaker 4: Your book is called The Art of Impossible, A Peak
Speaker 4: Performance Primer. And as I was telling you before the show,
Speaker 4: I have taken perhaps as many notes on this book
Speaker 4: as any I have read. So we've got a lot
Speaker 4: of different ways we could take this conversation. But before
Speaker 4: we get into it, we'll start, like we always do,
Speaker 4: with a parable. There is a grandfather who talking with
Speaker 4: his grandson in life, and he says, there's two wolves
Speaker 4: inside of us that are always at battle. What is
Speaker 4: a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
Speaker 4: and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
Speaker 4: represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
Speaker 4: grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
Speaker 4: and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 4: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 4: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 4: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 4: the work that you do.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it means to you in my
Speaker 1: life for my work, but I can tell you what
Speaker 1: it reminds me of, which is one of the really
Speaker 1: sort of strange and interesting things about human biology and
Speaker 1: unan performance is the system. Meaning our biology is designed
Speaker 1: in a very weird way at every level to go
Speaker 1: where you look, where you put your attention is where
Speaker 1: you end up. And this is very very clear in
Speaker 1: action sports, where I've done a lot of research where
Speaker 1: if you want to, for example, surf a tube, everything
Speaker 1: that has to take place in that tube takes place
Speaker 1: basically too fast for you to react. All you can
Speaker 1: really do is put your eyes on the end of
Speaker 1: the tube and you go there. When you want to ski,
Speaker 1: you're really hard, straight behind right, you get to the
Speaker 1: point where you put your eyes on the exit and
Speaker 1: you go there. We're goal directed machines on the internally,
Speaker 1: and what that essentially means is we don't live in reality.
Speaker 2: We live in a.
Speaker 1: World that's shaped predominantly by our fears and our goals,
Speaker 1: and in a sense, on an internal level, with those goals,
Speaker 1: the way sort of consciousness of our biology is designed
Speaker 1: to work.
Speaker 2: Once again, you go.
Speaker 1: Where you look, you go where you put your attention,
Speaker 1: So I guess in a sense it depends on which
Speaker 1: one you feed. Is roughly the same as a neurobiological principle,
Speaker 1: which essentially, we go where we look, we go, we
Speaker 1: put our attention.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Listener,
Speaker 4: while you were listening to that, what resonated with you?
Speaker 4: What one thing to feed your good Wolf comes to mind?
Speaker 4: If the thing that came to your mind was more
Speaker 4: time for stillness, or you've tried meditation before and you
Speaker 4: really haven't liked it, then I want to give you
Speaker 4: a quick tip that might make it better for you.
Speaker 4: And it's simply to stop expecting that you're not going
Speaker 4: to have thoughts. Nearly everyone has this expectation that they're
Speaker 4: going to sit down and meditate and they're going to
Speaker 4: stop having thoughts. And when they stop having thoughts, that
Speaker 4: means they're doing it well. But no one does that,
Speaker 4: and so we end up feeling like we're failing all
Speaker 4: of the time. Every three seconds, failed again, failed again.
Speaker 4: We develop a relationship with meditation that is aversive. So
Speaker 4: if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find
Speaker 4: it relaxing, check out my free meditation guide at Goodwolf
Speaker 4: dot me. Slash calm. In it, I walk you through
Speaker 4: my process to engage with meditation in a new way,
Speaker 4: and a lot of people have found it really helpful.
Speaker 4: That's good, Wolf dot me slash calm. So I'm going
Speaker 4: to start us in an unusual place. It's near the
Speaker 4: end of your book. Can you describe having lime disease
Speaker 4: and you describe going out and starting to surf, and
Speaker 4: you describe starting to have these mystical experiences. I'm wondering
Speaker 4: if you could share a little bit more about that,
Speaker 4: and I'm kind of curious whether they've still continued for you.
Speaker 4: And then I went to ground some of that back
Speaker 4: into what the science tells us, because you've done a
Speaker 4: great job of taking these mystical experiences and bringing them
Speaker 4: back to some of why we think they might be occurring.
Speaker 1: So, as you pointed out, when I was about thirty,
Speaker 1: I was very sick. I got lime disease, and I
Speaker 1: spent the better portion of three years in bed, and
Speaker 1: towards the end, I got dragged out to the Pacific
Speaker 1: Ocean and put on a surfboard. And this was at
Speaker 1: a time that I could barely walk across the room
Speaker 1: and I could focus, think clear headed and pain free
Speaker 1: and whatever, maybe twenty thirty minutes a day, and everything else.
Speaker 2: Was just fuzzy and painful.
Speaker 1: And I was out there maybe thirty seconds in a
Speaker 1: wave came and I literally probably took all the energy
Speaker 1: I had left in the world on my board around
Speaker 1: and I popped to my feet, and I popped into
Speaker 1: a dimension of time I didn't even know existed.
Speaker 2: Time seemed to slow down.
Speaker 1: I had a slid out of body experience where I
Speaker 1: felt like I was hovering about my body and sort
Speaker 1: of watching myself, but like I had panoramic vision.
Speaker 2: The most amazing part was that I.
Speaker 1: Was clear headed, and I felt great, and I hadn't
Speaker 1: felt even close vaguely normal for three years, so it
Speaker 1: was astounding. And I felt so good that day, and
Speaker 1: that experience was so wild that I ended up catching
Speaker 1: four more waves. And then when that was over, I
Speaker 1: was done, and I was exhausted, and my friends took
Speaker 1: me home, put me in the bed, and they didn't
Speaker 1: move again for about fourteen days. Fifteenth day walking in,
Speaker 1: I caught a ride with my neighbor and I went
Speaker 1: back to the beach and I did it again, and
Speaker 1: the amazing thing is over. The course about six to
Speaker 1: eight months, I wasn't went from about ten percent functional,
Speaker 1: meaning like I was functional about ten percent of time,
Speaker 1: to about eighty percent functional. And the only thing that
Speaker 1: I was doing different in my life was going surfing
Speaker 1: and having these quasimistical experiences in the way. So I
Speaker 1: was obviously very very curious about what the hell was
Speaker 1: going on, because surfing is not a known cure for
Speaker 1: chronic autoimmune conditions, and I'm a rational materialist, I'm a
Speaker 1: science guy. I don't have mystical experiences, and lime is
Speaker 1: only fatal if it gets into your brain. So I
Speaker 1: was pretty sure that the even though I was feeling better,
Speaker 1: the reason I was having these quasimistical experiences is because
Speaker 1: the disease had.
Speaker 2: Gotten in my brain.
Speaker 1: And so I lived on a giant quest to figure
Speaker 1: out what the heck was going on. And I very
Speaker 1: quickly discovered that these quasimistic experiences I have names. We
Speaker 1: call them flow states, and once you start to understand
Speaker 1: the neurobiology of flow what's going on in the brain,
Speaker 1: A lot of these so called mystical experiences that show
Speaker 1: up with this state are obviously very explainable via biology.
Speaker 1: But the second half of this question was am I
Speaker 1: still having these experiences today? Am I still getting into
Speaker 1: flow today?
Speaker 2: Yes? I'm still getting into flow today.
Speaker 4: And so would you have described them as mystical then
Speaker 4: because you didn't know what else to call them and
Speaker 4: you weren't as experienced with being in flow?
Speaker 1: Well, time slows down. I had an out of body experience.
Speaker 1: These are normally things that are classified as mystical experiences. Right,
Speaker 1: time dilation now, but I didn't know at the time.
Speaker 1: Is time dilation, which is the time has e strangely
Speaker 1: speed upward, can slow down. That's actually a foundational property
Speaker 1: of flow. It's one of the six psychological characteristics that
Speaker 1: are used to describe this date. So some form of
Speaker 1: time dilation, usually time speeds up right, you sit down
Speaker 1: and write a quick email. It's so sucked into what
Speaker 1: you're doing that an hour goes by, you look up
Speaker 1: and you're like, where did time go? That's what happens
Speaker 1: most of the time and flow. Occasionally, though, you get
Speaker 1: that freeze from effect that happened to me in the waves,
Speaker 1: or it's from your enemy's been in a car crash.
Speaker 4: So let's swing now all the way back around to
Speaker 4: kind of the beginning of the book. The book is
Speaker 4: called The Art of Impossible, and you describe two levels
Speaker 4: of impossible. There's impossible, as in like somebody being able
Speaker 4: to run the four minute mind, which was once thought
Speaker 4: of as impossible. So that's one type. But you describe
Speaker 4: another type of impossible that might apply to more of
Speaker 4: the people listening than trying to break a record that's
Speaker 4: never been broken as an example.
Speaker 1: Well, I think it all applies to everybody. Let me
Speaker 1: explain what I mean by that. I have spent my
Speaker 1: career studying those moments in time when the impossible becomes possible.
Speaker 1: I've done this in sports, I've done this in science
Speaker 1: and technology and business culture.
Speaker 2: That's what I call capital I.
Speaker 1: Impossible, doing that which has never been done. And what
Speaker 1: you just mentioned is lowercase I incompossible. There's small I impossible,
Speaker 1: which is essentially who I wrote the book for. Right
Speaker 1: lessons learned from those people who have accomplished capital impossible.
Speaker 1: It is for anybody who's going after lowercase I impossible, lowercase
Speaker 1: I impossibles, those things we think are impossible for ourselves.
Speaker 1: I'll give you a simple example from the book. I
Speaker 1: grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the nineteen seventies. It
Speaker 1: was a blue collar steel and I wanted to be
Speaker 1: a writer. I mean I wanted to be a writer
Speaker 1: from the time I was five or six years old.
Speaker 1: I didn't know any writers. I know how you became
Speaker 1: a writer. There was nowhe run around to ask. There
Speaker 1: was no internet, there were no books to read. It
Speaker 1: was a lowercase I impossible, meaning there is no clear
Speaker 1: path from where I am to where I want to
Speaker 1: get to and statistically not great odds of success. What
Speaker 1: are other lowercase I impossibles that we all kind of are
Speaker 1: more familiar with getting paid for what you love to do,
Speaker 1: overcoming trauma, overcoming an addiction, becoming world class at anything
Speaker 1: to do, becoming a successful entrepreneur or artist. I'm missing
Speaker 1: it one obvious one that's eluding me that I like
Speaker 1: to grab for.
Speaker 4: But I think it paint's a good picture.
Speaker 1: But I want to point out a couple of things,
Speaker 1: just to frame this up so people understand something. When
Speaker 1: we talk about peakuman performance, we're talking about nothing more
Speaker 1: or less, I guess, than getting our biology to work
Speaker 1: for us rether than against us. That's all that peakhuman
Speaker 1: performance is.
Speaker 2: And what this means is If.
Speaker 1: Your goal is capital ie impossible, that which has never
Speaker 1: been done, well, that's the biology you're going to draw.
Speaker 1: That's how you're going to do it. If your goal
Speaker 1: is small eye impossible, well the biology is the same,
Speaker 1: the tools are the same. In fact, if your goal
Speaker 1: is man, small eye impossible, caw fuck that. I'm just
Speaker 1: trying to get through Monday, right, like, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: The biology is the same, The set of tools are
Speaker 1: the same because evolutions shaped human beings and the work
Speaker 1: that I do involves figuring out how to optimize that
Speaker 1: biology and its scales. Meaning it's the same in everyone
Speaker 1: or At the Flow Research Collective, we train on average
Speaker 1: about a thousand people a month, and we train everybody
Speaker 1: from kind of members of the US Special Forces and
Speaker 1: professional athletes and c suite executive CEOs of major companies
Speaker 1: all the way to like soccer moms from Ohio and
Speaker 1: insurance workers from Indiana and you know, software coders from
Speaker 1: Bangalore right becauseus the work that I do is built
Speaker 1: on biology. The principles apply to everybody and anybody can
Speaker 1: use them.
Speaker 4: In the book, you talk about biology scaling, but personality doesn't.
Speaker 4: And so the principles that we're going to spend a
Speaker 4: little bit of time talking about and as I mentioned
Speaker 4: from the number of notes I took, we're going to
Speaker 4: skim the very slightest surface of But the principles that
Speaker 4: we're about to cover, you're saying are happening at the
Speaker 4: level of biology, regardless of what our psychology might be.
Speaker 1: Yes, personality, what your genetics are. Now, if you're not
Speaker 1: six ' ten, you know you're impossible is to be
Speaker 1: a center in the NBA and your four foot nine.
Speaker 2: Okay, this is not.
Speaker 4: What we're talking about, right, Like you need a different Like, yeah.
Speaker 2: You need a different book.
Speaker 1: I can't help you with the genetics part at all,
Speaker 1: Like that's a different thing.
Speaker 2: But barring that, yes, biology scales.
Speaker 1: My work is centered on the state of performance known
Speaker 1: as flow. Right, we talked about flow as well. I
Speaker 1: was experiencing out in the waves. It is, as I
Speaker 1: alluded to, it's defined as an optimal state of consciousness.
Speaker 1: We refeel our best and we perform our best. More specifically,
Speaker 1: it's any of those moments of rapt attention, total absorption.
Speaker 1: You get so focused on what you're doing that everything
Speaker 1: else just disappears. Right time, dilights as we talked about
Speaker 1: your sense of self disappears, actual awareness will start to merge,
Speaker 1: and all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go
Speaker 1: through the roof. We could talk about how what through
Speaker 1: the roof actually means huge boosts in motivation, grit, productivity, creativity, learning, empathy, perspectives.
Speaker 2: So a little bit of.
Speaker 1: Strength, stamina, fast chatters, a couple other things. We can
Speaker 1: talk about where the why later, But the point I
Speaker 1: want to make is those are basically all the things
Speaker 1: you want to accelerate for cognitive It's the whole suite,
Speaker 1: it's all our tools, they're all amplified and flow. And
Speaker 1: here's the kicker. Everybody's hardwired for floor flow. It's a
Speaker 1: foundational part of being human. Evolution shaped every human being
Speaker 1: to perform at their best in float. Flow is how
Speaker 1: we do. How we're hardwired for pre performance. There are
Speaker 1: other things going on during pre performance and other things
Speaker 1: that lead to it, but flow is at the center
Speaker 1: of it. And one of the most well established facts
Speaker 1: in flow science is that the state is universal, shows
Speaker 1: up in anyone anywhere, provided certain initial conditions are that
Speaker 1: so everybody watching this, listening to this can get into flow,
Speaker 1: and you can get this same boost and performance. So
Speaker 1: for starters, that's one thing that we're talking about. When
Speaker 1: you say biology scales.
Speaker 4: Excellent, and you've written about flow elsewhere, it's been part
Speaker 4: of your writing for a while now, and so you
Speaker 4: say that this book expands upon that. Right, It certainly
Speaker 4: talks about we need flow, but we also have to
Speaker 4: train up some of the other skills like motivation, learning,
Speaker 4: and creativity. So a lot of the book is really
Speaker 4: talking about how we increase our motivation, are learning, and
Speaker 4: how we increase our creativity. So talk about how flow
Speaker 4: ties together with those three things.
Speaker 1: So, as I said, peak performance is getting our biology
Speaker 1: to work for us right then against us?
Speaker 2: What is that biology?
Speaker 1: What are the sets of skills being amplified motivation, learning, creativity,
Speaker 1: and flow? That is what we mean by cognitive peak performance.
Speaker 1: The way to think about this is, in any situation,
Speaker 1: any challenge, motivation is what gets you into the game.
Speaker 2: Learning is what allows you to continue to play, especially if.
Speaker 1: You're going after like high hard goals that are that
Speaker 1: are complicated, you don't quite not get there. Creativity is
Speaker 1: how you steer right, creat problem solvings how you steer,
Speaker 1: and flow is how you sort of turbo boast, all
Speaker 1: those things sort of beyond reason with expectations. But you
Speaker 1: asked a sort of different question, which is sort of
Speaker 1: where I got stuck thinking about, like which way to
Speaker 1: frame this? How they relate is interesting. So, as you
Speaker 1: pointed out, I've been doing this a long time. I've
Speaker 1: been training people in flow for years and years and years.
Speaker 1: I think I've probably spoken to or trained a quarter
Speaker 1: million people. Is I guess my staff has come up with.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's right or not, but somewhere
Speaker 1: around there it's a lot of people. And what we've
Speaker 1: learned about flow over the past ten to fifteen years
Speaker 1: is more about the neurobiology flow, what's going on in
Speaker 1: the brain and the body when we're in this state.
Speaker 1: And psychology is useful, but it's often metaphor. Neurobiology is mechanism.
Speaker 1: So if you want to make something reliable and repeatable,
Speaker 1: you want mechanism. So that is what has happened. We've
Speaker 1: gotten very good at training flow. And when I say
Speaker 1: very good, I said that at the Flow Research Collective
Speaker 1: we train about a thousand people a month. We measure
Speaker 1: flow with the standard psychological instrument pre and POST, and
Speaker 1: we see about a seventy percent boost in flow consistently
Speaker 1: back end of our trainings, butt and button is how
Speaker 1: everything is related. What we used to see is you
Speaker 1: get this big burst and flow because it turns out
Speaker 1: this is easy to train, and then there'd be this
Speaker 1: spectacular return to baseline, like they'd get a ton of flow,
Speaker 1: and then it would just like it's somebody turned off
Speaker 1: the flow tap and flow is one of the most pleasurable, addictive, meaningful,
Speaker 1: life affirming experiences we can possibly have. And you give
Speaker 1: people a whole lot more of that and then you
Speaker 1: take it away or it stops showing up. You have
Speaker 1: very pissed off people. And we had very pissed off people,
Speaker 1: and so spent a really long time trying to figure
Speaker 1: out what the hell's going wrong? What is and what
Speaker 1: we realized is problem wasn't flow. It was that all
Speaker 1: the stuff that flow amplifies, but specifically motivation, learning and creativity,
Speaker 1: if you hadn't trained those things up at alongside flow,
Speaker 1: you couldn't keep pace with the acceleration that the state provided.
Speaker 1: And worse, when psychologists and researchers talking about motivation, the
Speaker 1: term is technically defined as the energy for action but
Speaker 1: what they really mean as a whole bunch just motivation
Speaker 1: is that catch all term for external motivation or extrinsic motivation,
Speaker 1: So like money, sex, fame, things in the world that
Speaker 1: we want intrinsic motivation, internal motivators like curiosity or passion
Speaker 1: or purpose. We're also talking about goal setting and grit
Speaker 1: and if you haven't done really good grit work right,
Speaker 1: flows this enormously pleasurable experience, but it doesn't last forever.
Speaker 1: And if you haven't done the good selling gridwork, there
Speaker 1: are going to be days where there's no flow the
Speaker 1: right and it's just hard work, hard slogging. And if
Speaker 1: you haven't done the work to develop really good grit skills,
Speaker 1: those days are going to be very, very difficult. They
Speaker 1: get a little easier because of flow, and we know
Speaker 1: that flow massively amplifies grit. But some people have this
Speaker 1: problem when they do this flow work, where they start
Speaker 1: to feel that it's a bliss chunkie problem. Flow is
Speaker 1: so addictively pleasurable, right, they're like, oh, dude, everything's got
Speaker 1: to feel this good. This is how life's supposed to feel. Well, No, no,
Speaker 1: it's not. And there's times when you can't get into
Speaker 1: flow or you haven't. On the really hardcore grit work,
Speaker 1: you can't sustain the flow. It's not simple, but important.
Speaker 4: I think, yep, absolutely, that really covered it. And I
Speaker 4: think you make that point a bunch of times, and
Speaker 4: I think it's an important one that on our way
Speaker 4: to impossible, flow is an absolute.
Speaker 2: Booster, necessary but not sufficient, yep.
Speaker 4: And that it feels really good. But along the way
Speaker 4: to impossible there's going to be a lot of feeling
Speaker 4: not very good also. And if all we're thinking about
Speaker 4: is oh, we, like you said, I should be feeling flow,
Speaker 4: I should be feeling good. This should always be wonderful,
Speaker 4: we won't have what it takes to keep going all
Speaker 4: the way too impossible, because there are times it's not easy.
Speaker 1: The way I put it in the book, I think
Speaker 1: more meaningful does not always mean more pleasant, and that
Speaker 1: is very very true. In fact, interestingly, when positive psychologists
Speaker 1: talk about happiness these days, there's three levels of happiness
Speaker 1: available on the planet. The first level is happy as
Speaker 1: how do you feel right here, right now. There's not
Speaker 1: a whole lot you can do about that level. Right
Speaker 1: you can make yourself, as Dan Harris said, ten percent
Speaker 1: happier gratitude practice is mindfulness practices, regular acts. There's stuff
Speaker 1: you can do, but because of how emotional set points work,
Speaker 1: those points are set up usually about ten eleven years old,
Speaker 1: and this is the worst we're going to feel and
Speaker 1: is the best we're going to feel in our lives
Speaker 1: going to take place pretty much in the middle, and
Speaker 1: barring chronic unemployment or the death of a child. On
Speaker 1: the low end, that's the low end, it doesn't move.
Speaker 1: It's pretty set. High end can move with constant supposures
Speaker 1: that flow, but as general, it doesn't. In other words,
Speaker 1: you can get ten percent happy, that's about it. And
Speaker 1: flow is no guarantee that you're going to be happier
Speaker 1: because flow takes place when we're pushing on our skills
Speaker 1: to the utmost. So usually when we're doing that, we're uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: And if you're really a peak performer, you're going to
Speaker 1: be uncomfortable all the time, right, because you're always sort
Speaker 1: of trying to push on your skills and be a
Speaker 1: little better and be a little better. You get very
Speaker 1: good at being uncomfortable, comfortable being uncomfortable, but moment to
Speaker 1: moment happiness probably doesn't move much. The next two levels
Speaker 1: of happiness available to even being. The second level is
Speaker 1: a high flow lifestyle, right. It's a lifestyle in which
Speaker 1: you get regular access to flow. This could be doesn't
Speaker 1: matter what you do. Maybe what you do doesn't produce
Speaker 1: a lot of flow. I live in how and all
Speaker 1: around me there's tons of people who work whatever job
Speaker 1: they can get in the summer so they can ski
Speaker 1: all winter. That's a high flow lifestyle, right. The best
Speaker 1: we get to feel the planet is a high flow
Speaker 1: lifestyle where the thing that is giving us the most
Speaker 1: flow is coupled to our purpose. And you know, as
Speaker 1: a guy who my wife and I ran an animal sanctuary,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of in a very very very poor rural
Speaker 1: county for a very very long time with a lot
Speaker 1: of animal cruelty. That's a very high flow lifestyle with
Speaker 1: a lot of purpose. It was also pretty miserable, grueling,
Speaker 1: difficult work. It produced a lot of flow along the
Speaker 1: way and a lot of meaning. My point is that
Speaker 1: that kind of work produces deep meaning, deep contentment, deep
Speaker 1: you piece even but happiness that means just a thin drug. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: that's I think what you start to discover overview.
Speaker 2: It's not that you don't want to be happy.
Speaker 1: It's that it's a thin drug and there are much
Speaker 1: better drugs.
Speaker 4: Out there right right, and often aiming right at happiness
Speaker 4: as that being the goal is particularly counterproductive.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's a good way to miss it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a good way to miss it.
Speaker 4: So what I'm going to do from here is we're
Speaker 4: just going to skip through a few different parts of
Speaker 4: the book and hit some different things that bring together
Speaker 4: some of these different components of motivation, learning, and curiosity.
Speaker 4: So I want to talk about motivation for a minute,
Speaker 4: because you talk about there being a stack that's really
Speaker 4: important in the drive part of motivation, which we would
Speaker 4: think of is the way most people typically think of
Speaker 4: motivation as I feel like doing something right, I have
Speaker 4: the energy to want to do something. And you mentioned
Speaker 4: that there are really five things that make up this
Speaker 4: drive stack. You talk about curiosity, passion, purpose, and then
Speaker 4: autonomy and mastery after those, I'm wondering if we could
Speaker 4: talk a little bit about curiosity, because the way that
Speaker 4: you laid out for people to find some of their
Speaker 4: curiosity I really loved. I really liked some of the
Speaker 4: exercises that were there, and so I was wondering if
Speaker 4: you could walk us through briefly the basic exercise and
Speaker 4: how somebody can start to find maybe what their curiosity is.
Speaker 4: I hear this up from a lot of people. I
Speaker 4: don't quite know what it is. How you cultivate a
Speaker 4: passion by sort of going through the gate of curiosity,
Speaker 4: I guess would be the better way to say it.
Speaker 1: So, as you pointed out, there are a bunch of
Speaker 1: intrinsic motivators. There are way more than the five you
Speaker 1: mentioned curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, master but those tend in
Speaker 1: the science to be the biggest five. Right. You could
Speaker 1: listen intrinsic motivators forever, but those are the biggest five.
Speaker 1: And what the research shows is that if you want
Speaker 1: more motivation in your life, you actually start with extrinsic motivators.
Speaker 1: You've got to start like with you need enough money
Speaker 1: in a sense to take care of basic safety and
Speaker 1: security needs. You have to deal with safety and security first.
Speaker 1: Now it's a little bit. What the research shows is
Speaker 1: you basically have to be able to pay all your
Speaker 1: bills and have a little left over for discretionary spending
Speaker 1: a little, it's not a whole lot. Once that's in place,
Speaker 1: if you want more motivation, more productivity, more energy for action.
Speaker 1: Turns out, it's not that we stop wanting things like money,
Speaker 1: sex and fame. We still want them, but as a
Speaker 1: driver of performance and productivity, they're not as powerful as into.
Speaker 1: Ternal motivators are intrinsic drivers, and there's five of them,
Speaker 1: as you pointed out, curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and master
Speaker 1: These are the big five. And what you notice among
Speaker 1: peak performers everywhere is much in the way that you
Speaker 1: like anybody. An athlete will like stack fuel sources, meaning
Speaker 1: they're always going to.
Speaker 2: Hydrate super well.
Speaker 1: They're going to make sure they have enough protein and
Speaker 1: carbs and fats and blah blah blah right and the
Speaker 1: right nutrition and the right supplements and the right everything.
Speaker 1: You also want to stack internal fuel sources. It's hard
Speaker 1: to do anything in this world, and it's hard to
Speaker 1: go after anything high hard goals. You need as many
Speaker 1: of internal fuel sources as you possibly can get. In
Speaker 1: other words, you want all your intrinsic motivators, your big
Speaker 1: five aligned in point in the same direction. And they're
Speaker 1: actually built that way. They're built to come online in
Speaker 1: a certain order and to point us in direction. And
Speaker 1: as you pointed out the most foundational human motivators curiosity.
Speaker 1: So whether what's the big deal about intrinsic motivators, Like,
Speaker 1: why do we even care? Why are we having this conversation?
Speaker 1: Intrinsic motivators give us focus for free. That's the really
Speaker 1: big deal. Your brain takes about twenty five percent of
Speaker 1: your energy at rest, and it gets two percent of
Speaker 1: your body weight. It's a giant energy hat, right, and
Speaker 1: focus is a huge, huge, huge caloric energy expense.
Speaker 2: You're curious about it.
Speaker 1: You're paying attention without working too hard or at all.
Speaker 2: That's great.
Speaker 1: Now, Curiosity, as you alluded to, is designed biologically to
Speaker 1: be built into passion. When people say passion, what that
Speaker 1: looks like biologically is often just the intersection of multiple curiosities.
Speaker 1: The way to think about this is like, maybe you're
Speaker 1: interested in football and you're interested in nutrition.
Speaker 2: Now, each of.
Speaker 1: Those on their own, they may not have enough energy
Speaker 1: kind of be a lifelong passion something you're going to
Speaker 1: spend your whole life, you know, totally paying attention to
Speaker 1: all the time. But if you can figure out where
Speaker 1: three or four year curiosities intersect and get a couple
Speaker 1: of easy wins, there and get some other things going
Speaker 1: on that I talk about in The Art Impossible. That's
Speaker 1: sort of the ingredient for passion. Now, if anybody wants
Speaker 1: to know how to do this, yes, you can read
Speaker 1: The Art Impossible, but I can make it easier on
Speaker 1: you. You can go to www. Thepassion recipe dot com, which
Speaker 1: is we basically took these chapters because this was so
Speaker 1: important to so many people, and we turn it into
Speaker 1: an interactive workbook.
Speaker 2: It's free.
Speaker 1: You just put it online for people the Passion recipe
Speaker 1: dot com. It teaches you how to cultivate and turn
Speaker 1: curiosity into passion and turn passion into purpose. So if
Speaker 1: you want to cultivate curiosity, you really just want to
Speaker 1: start with twenty five things you're interested in it. And
Speaker 1: all I mean by interested it is a free weekend.
Speaker 1: You would maybe want to spend it watching a couple
Speaker 1: movies about the subject, or reading a book, or having
Speaker 1: a conversation or two with an expert. Right, that's what
Speaker 1: I mean interested. Make a list of twenty five things
Speaker 1: you're interested in. The key here is try to be
Speaker 1: as specific as possible. Right, don't be interested in football,
Speaker 1: be interested in the past, blocking mechanics, required to play
Speaker 1: left tackle as precise as you possibly can be.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: I loved your punk rock analogy. You got to give
Speaker 4: the if you remember, Oh yeah, don't be interested in
Speaker 4: punk rock.
Speaker 1: Right, don't be interested in punk rock. Be interested. I
Speaker 1: think it was the evolution of political punk from Crass
Speaker 1: to Rise Against. Had an old girlfriend who lived in
Speaker 1: the original Crass commune, And I don't know. I'm just
Speaker 1: a huge rise Against fan. I guess, but which is true?
Speaker 4: Do you love Against Me?
Speaker 1: I do love Against Me? They got a little more melodic.
Speaker 1: I really like early Against Me. It's a little too
Speaker 1: poppy for me, Like it's not quite as punk as
Speaker 1: they were, and I like the older punk better. But
Speaker 1: I really do like Against Me a lot. They've got
Speaker 1: a handful of my absolute favorite punk songs ever, Miami Baby,
Speaker 1: I'm an Anarchist.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're live record that they put out.
Speaker 2: Oh I love it.
Speaker 4: I don't know if you've yea love it.
Speaker 2: It's so good.
Speaker 1: The live version of the lyric is Condoli is Yeah,
Speaker 1: what the hell? From her Lips to God's Ears? I
Speaker 1: think that's the name of the song, From Her Lips
Speaker 1: to God's Ears. The live version of that is really good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Potatoes, Rice and Beans live is really good on
Speaker 1: that album as well.
Speaker 4: They're an amazing live band. So we've derailed ourselves now.
Speaker 2: But back to punk is something. Now you got my attention.
Speaker 4: Maybe we'll see if we lead back around to it.
Speaker 4: So we're making a list of twenty five things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, twenty five things you're interested in, and then you
Speaker 1: just want to look for places they intersect. So you know,
Speaker 1: I said, let's say nutrition is also on your list.
Speaker 1: Again too vague, right, you're interested in the past blocking
Speaker 1: mechanics to play left tackle, and nutrition is too vague,
Speaker 1: But maybe you're The example I give in the book
Speaker 1: is insects as a few food source, right, So where
Speaker 1: could they possibly intersect? Well, it requires a lot of
Speaker 1: calories to play left tackle, right, would insects make a
Speaker 1: good football food? That's an intersection? And all I say
Speaker 1: is when you find those intersections, play there for a while.
Speaker 1: Just play there, go there, hang out, spend ten minutes
Speaker 1: twenty minutes a day, do this over months and months
Speaker 1: and months. Test out those intersections. See which ones are
Speaker 1: really sticky and grabby for you, or there's a lot
Speaker 1: of energy. But if you can figure out where three
Speaker 1: or four of your curiosities intersect and start playing there
Speaker 1: and learning stuff and getting some easy wins along the way.
Speaker 2: That's how we build passion.
Speaker 1: A couple things that are worth pointing out, though, because
Speaker 1: people have this problem when they start cultivating passion, is
Speaker 1: they think about passion. I say, you know, give me
Speaker 1: an example of athletic pass You get like Lebron James
Speaker 1: coming in for the dunk, you know, with a skowl
Speaker 1: on his face and the finals, right, And yes, you
Speaker 1: are right, that is passion. But that is late stage passion.
Speaker 1: That is not what early stage passion looks like or
Speaker 1: feels like. Early stage passion is just a little kid
Speaker 1: standing in a driveway trying to get a basketball to drop.
Speaker 1: And it feels like that on the inside, right, it
Speaker 1: feels more like curiosity and little successes than like this burning,
Speaker 1: consuming thing that you think if you expect to this
Speaker 1: like giant burning fire all at once, it's not going
Speaker 1: to be there. And the other thing is you don't
Speaker 1: want it there right away. What you want to do
Speaker 1: is slowly cultivate your passion and make sure you've got
Speaker 1: it right, because you don't want to be a couple
Speaker 1: of years into this is my passion to discover Oh shit,
Speaker 1: it was only a phase, right. I don't actually want
Speaker 1: to spend the next two years on an archaeological dig
Speaker 1: in the deserts of Egypt, because no, it turns out
Speaker 1: it was a phase. Right, Like when you come to
Speaker 1: that point, if you screw it up, it's really demotivating.
Speaker 1: So on the front end, you want to go slowly here.
Speaker 1: This is not one of those things in peak performance.
Speaker 2: Everybody can do this.
Speaker 1: Everybody can figure out align their curiosities, build them into passion,
Speaker 1: build passion and a purpose. We're all biologically hardwired for it.
Speaker 1: We all can do it. But you want to do
Speaker 1: it slowly, and you don't want to be in a
Speaker 1: rush in this case, right. A lot of people are
Speaker 1: really impatient to be there already and get it, And
Speaker 1: here you really don't. The system, the biology is designed
Speaker 1: for this to be cultivated over time, and you don't
Speaker 1: want to make an error on this one. This is
Speaker 1: one of those places where you've got to go slow.
Speaker 2: To go fast. All right.
Speaker 4: Now, let's pause for a quick good wolf reminder, and
Speaker 4: this one is on meditation. If while you're meditating your
Speaker 4: mind wanders, you probably, like most people treat that as
Speaker 4: a moment of failure, like ough, my mind wandered again.
Speaker 4: But let's flip that and instead treat that as a
Speaker 4: moment of celebration because in that moment, your mind actually
Speaker 4: woke up and you were mindful of the fact that
Speaker 4: your mind wandered. So it's a win. So if we
Speaker 4: can flip that right on its head and say, oh,
Speaker 4: good job, brain, we actually make it more likely that
Speaker 4: a our brain is going to do it more often
Speaker 4: because we're training it, and b that we're going to
Speaker 4: enjoy it more. And specifically, it's about how to make
Speaker 4: you not dread meditation so much and actually find it relaxing.
Speaker 4: Check out my free meditation guide at Goodwolf dot me
Speaker 4: slash calm. If you say in the book, you know,
Speaker 4: we often think of, like you said, passion, get obsessed,
Speaker 4: stay obsessed, and you say, you know, let's start with
Speaker 4: get curious, Stay curious. All right, I'm going to jump
Speaker 4: right out of that section, even though we could go
Speaker 4: from there into how to turn that passion into a
Speaker 4: purpose and you know, autonomy and mastery in that area.
Speaker 4: But I want to move into a little bit about
Speaker 4: grit and I want to talk about the idea of
Speaker 4: learning to work with our thoughts as part of grit.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's really key.
Speaker 1: So place to start, I guess is that when psychologists
Speaker 1: define grit, they often define it using Angela Duckworth's definition
Speaker 1: as the intersection of passion and perseverance. And I love
Speaker 1: Angela's work. She's an exceptionally bright woman. She's done exceptionally
Speaker 1: great research. But when you talk to peak performers about grit,
Speaker 1: they actually say, hey, wait a minute. They train six
Speaker 1: different kinds of grit skills and all sort of require
Speaker 1: different techniques, and in the end they sort of all
Speaker 1: will boil down to the same thing, but you have
Speaker 1: to train them independently for a while. The first is
Speaker 1: the perseverance, the grit we're all familiar with, right, kick
Speaker 1: me in the teeth, punch me in that God doesn't matter,
Speaker 1: I'm still coming. And that's the first level of grit
Speaker 1: is often and by the way, it's if you want
Speaker 1: to train that level of grit, that level of you
Speaker 1: want to start physically. The research says, even if you
Speaker 1: want to train it cognitively, which is this question that
Speaker 1: you asked about, and we're going to get there. The
Speaker 1: place to start is physically and by perseverance. If you
Speaker 1: work out, you go to the gym and you normally
Speaker 1: do three sets of ten when you bench press. Next time,
Speaker 1: do two sets of ten and one set of eleven,
Speaker 1: very very slowly. You just want to push outside your
Speaker 1: comfort zone a little bit at a time, over and
Speaker 1: over and over again. And here's the key, especially on
Speaker 1: perseverance side, because this is this is tricky and people
Speaker 1: miss this a lot. It's not enough to put in
Speaker 1: the hard work to get grittier. You have to notice.
Speaker 1: So you have to in other words, you got it. Yes,
Speaker 1: you got to show up and do that next eleventh
Speaker 1: eleventh rep you know, every time you work.
Speaker 2: Out, just for the next month.
Speaker 1: But you also got to remember at the end of
Speaker 1: the month to look back and go, wow, the entire
Speaker 1: time every time I had to do that eleventh breath,
Speaker 1: I got it. I'm tough enough to do that. You've
Speaker 1: got to remember to notice that you're developing grit along
Speaker 1: the way, which is really important because you have to
Speaker 1: trust that grit for it to really make a difference
Speaker 1: in your life. You need to be able to know
Speaker 1: that you go into the situation and you're actually grittier, right,
Speaker 1: Like you can handle a little bit more, which is
Speaker 1: why we want to do this for a long period time,
Speaker 1: and we want to pay attention to it. Once you've
Speaker 1: sort of become a little physically grittier, the next thing
Speaker 1: to pay attention to if you're interested in pea performance,
Speaker 1: if you're interested in getting through tomorrow, I think, is
Speaker 1: the grit to control your thoughts. Right, You've got to
Speaker 1: pay attention to what's going on up here, because you know,
Speaker 1: if you're anything like me, it's bad upstairs a lot
Speaker 1: of the time, right, And so if I'm not kind
Speaker 1: of paying attention to what's going on in my head,
Speaker 1: it can often swallow me. There's a number of different
Speaker 1: ways to sort of tune your thoughts and work with
Speaker 1: this particular problem. Gratitude less or mindfulness work meditation. These
Speaker 1: are two really, really great methods. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: other stuff you can do. If you're more kind of
Speaker 1: kinesthetically oriented like me, you may prefer yoga to just
Speaker 1: straight up meditation because there's some movement involved. But there's
Speaker 1: a lot of different ways to sort of get some
Speaker 1: space between kind of thought and emotion. There's a gap
Speaker 1: between thought and emotion. What you want to try to
Speaker 1: do is like stretch it out so that when the
Speaker 1: thought pops up, before you get super angry and totally
Speaker 1: lose your temper at your wife or spouse or husband
Speaker 1: or whomever, you have a second to get in there
Speaker 1: and be like, who wha whoa?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Really sure this is the reaction you want?
Speaker 4: You bring up a couple different things here. One is
Speaker 4: this idea of using the phrase control in our thoughts,
Speaker 4: which you then later sort of say, well, that's a
Speaker 4: little bit of a misnomer, right. Any of us who
Speaker 4: have sat down to meditate know the initial sort of
Speaker 4: launch of a thought into our brain is not really
Speaker 4: a controllable phenomenon. What comes up is what comes up.
Speaker 4: It's really what we do after that. And I love
Speaker 4: that you talk about the self talk. You say self
Speaker 4: talk's really important.
Speaker 3: Here.
Speaker 4: There's a quote in here from Michael Gervais that I
Speaker 4: absolutely love, and listeners will have heard me talk about
Speaker 4: this a lot, and he says that there's only two
Speaker 4: kinds of thoughts, those that constrict us or those that
Speaker 4: expand us. And I think that is such a powerful idea.
Speaker 4: You know, even when decision making is this decision going
Speaker 4: to make me bigger or smaller? Is it going to
Speaker 4: expand me or contract me? That core idea is so powerful.
Speaker 2: I think so too. Well.
Speaker 1: What I like about it is for me. When Mike
Speaker 1: first said it to me, I thought about, well, you
Speaker 1: know what thoughts that create more space feel like internally right,
Speaker 1: and so that I was like, Oh, this is totally
Speaker 1: applicable because I know what this feels like, so I
Speaker 1: can steer from this right off the bat.
Speaker 2: Mike's very very good at that.
Speaker 1: At coming up with performance tools where you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: I like, not only do I know what you mean,
Speaker 1: I know what it feels like.
Speaker 4: That's why I love it too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I'll tell you something funny about this. This
Speaker 1: is not exactly in the art impossible. We were having
Speaker 1: this conversation on this phrase. So I was skiing week
Speaker 1: and a half ago, one of the biggest lines I've
Speaker 1: ever skied of my life, and there's one hundred foot
Speaker 1: straight line at the end of it, which means you
Speaker 1: don't get to.
Speaker 2: Turn for one hundred feet.
Speaker 1: You just like you pin between two rock walls and
Speaker 1: you just have to hold keep it together until you
Speaker 1: get to the exit or you'll die and it's terrifying.
Speaker 1: And I got into the straight line and my right
Speaker 1: ski hit a bunch of ice icicles actually that were
Speaker 1: fallen off the trees and into the run and it
Speaker 1: was like my race ski was bouncing on marbles and
Speaker 1: the guy was Schema said later it looked like I
Speaker 1: started to tip forward and like I was going to somersault,
Speaker 1: which would have put me in the hospital easy, possibly worse.
Speaker 1: And my internal experience, the way I described it to afterwards,
Speaker 1: like my brain found another gear, which I appropriately referred
Speaker 1: to as fuck this, I'm not dying now, right, But
Speaker 1: I like, I got incredibly angry in the moment, like
Speaker 1: in rage, and I get what what he said is
Speaker 1: is just look like I sat back up and shot
Speaker 1: out of there, and I remember nothing at other than
Speaker 1: just being like, wow, this is that feeling that precedes
Speaker 1: the I'm falling now, which precedes the i'mgoing to the
Speaker 1: hospital now.
Speaker 2: And I was like, I'm not.
Speaker 1: Like no, and I got super angry. And what was interesting,
Speaker 1: and this is why I'm bringing this up, is we
Speaker 1: were talking about that experience in the context of Mike's quote,
Speaker 1: because you would not inspect like anger to be a
Speaker 1: thought that creates space, but in this particular case, this
Speaker 1: particular context.
Speaker 2: It was the only tool. Right.
Speaker 1: If I wouldn't have grabbed for something that would have
Speaker 1: given me a lot of testosterone and adrenaline at that moment,
Speaker 1: I had to fight against gravity, right, like iscles stripped beforeward,
Speaker 1: which is really interesting. And we were talking about how
Speaker 1: sometimes thoughts that create space are not going to be
Speaker 1: the obvious ones sometimes. That was what the conversation was,
Speaker 1: and I thought it was an interesting subtle point in
Speaker 1: one I hadn't thought about before.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a great story. We're nearing the end of
Speaker 4: our time. But let's hopscotch ahead in the book here,
Speaker 4: and I want to talk about another part that I
Speaker 4: absolutely loved, which was the five Steps to Learn Anything.
Speaker 1: Wait wait, wait, wait wait, you left out the most
Speaker 1: important part of that title, the five steps to learn
Speaker 1: anything before you have a public opinion on it. Five
Speaker 1: not so easy steps to learn anything.
Speaker 4: Yes, you're right, so easy steps. Yes, I better add
Speaker 4: that to my outline. And you sort of talk about
Speaker 4: the other part of it that I loved is you're like,
Speaker 4: before I'm going to have a public opinion about something,
Speaker 4: I'm going to have gone through those, and I remember thinking, boy,
Speaker 4: that would be refreshing for the world for more people
Speaker 4: to think, Well, before I'm going to have an opinion
Speaker 4: on that, I'm going to go.
Speaker 2: Through these five steps.
Speaker 4: It was really practical, and it really sort of dovetailed
Speaker 4: in some ways with my experience of learning things. And
Speaker 4: there were some subtleties that I had not thought of
Speaker 4: before that I think will help me in the future.
Speaker 4: So let's just kind of go through them relatively quickly.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of detail in there, but here's the
Speaker 1: big idea. What's worth knowing is learning works a certain
Speaker 1: way in the brain. We're designed to learn in a
Speaker 1: certain way, and if you can sort of do that
Speaker 1: and harness that, you can get a lot farther faster.
Speaker 1: So in the five not Sueazy steps, basically a lesson
Speaker 1: in how to read and how to learn from. This
Speaker 1: is about knowledge acquisition, not skills acquisitions. So this is
Speaker 1: about how do you learn a subject. It's going to
Speaker 1: involve reading. And what I want to talk about now
Speaker 1: is what do you pay attention to?
Speaker 2: Will you read?
Speaker 1: Because it's from a neurobiological standpoint, it's not what you
Speaker 1: think it is, And it's much more interesting when you
Speaker 1: actually know how the brain work is designed to work,
Speaker 1: makes it so much easier. So the things that I
Speaker 1: talk about paying attention to when you're reading, when you're
Speaker 1: trying to learn, because it's not what you did in
Speaker 1: high school or what you did in school, right, it's
Speaker 1: almost the exact opposite one. Your brain loves narrative. Your
Speaker 1: brain does cause and effect all the time. Right, this
Speaker 1: caused this?
Speaker 2: Why?
Speaker 1: Because we want to know that. We want to know
Speaker 1: how to create our future. Right, we want to know
Speaker 1: if this causes this, I know how to get that,
Speaker 1: I know how to intervene. I know how it works.
Speaker 1: That's what a narrative is. That's what a story is.
Speaker 1: This happened first, This happens, This happened third. Right, So
Speaker 1: when you're reading, one of the first things we want
Speaker 1: to pay attention to a little bit is history, the
Speaker 1: history of a subject. First, stop being intimidated by subjects.
Speaker 1: Just realize that any intellectual subject, whatever it is, it's
Speaker 1: just a voyage of discovery.
Speaker 2: Somebody had a question, they answered that question.
Speaker 1: It led to another question, and somebody had another question
Speaker 1: and they answered that one.
Speaker 2: On the right. That's the voyage of discovery.
Speaker 1: That is any subject and it's a narrative, and so
Speaker 1: just pay a little bit of attention to the order.
Speaker 1: The narrative is the big Christmas tree. If you give
Speaker 1: your brain the big Christmas tree, when the individual facts
Speaker 1: show up ornaments, you'll have an easier time remembering them
Speaker 1: because your brain is going to be like, oh, this happened.
Speaker 1: I put this fact right there. It slots in. This
Speaker 1: is something your brain naturally does, so you're just taking
Speaker 1: advantage of kind of your own basic software there. The
Speaker 1: second thing you want to pay attention to is terminology jargon.
Speaker 1: And what I mean by that is and I will
Speaker 1: be the first person to like, I have a flat
Speaker 1: rule in my company and by my life. If somebody
Speaker 1: needs a lot of big words to explain it, they're
Speaker 1: probably lying. Something I learned as a journalist, right For
Speaker 1: years and years and years, I've met the smartest people
Speaker 1: on the planet, and most of them can explain their
Speaker 1: thing to you as.
Speaker 2: If you were five years old.
Speaker 1: It's always the folks who don't quite know what they're
Speaker 1: talking about that make it really fancy. In my opinion,
Speaker 1: that said jargon, while super annoying, tends to be annoyingly
Speaker 1: precise and technical language often contains most of a subject.
Speaker 1: So when people talk about I need to learn a
Speaker 1: new subject, a large chunk of what they're actually saying
Speaker 1: is you need to learn vocabulary.
Speaker 2: So the way I do it is, when.
Speaker 1: I'm reading one of these books, if I'm getting fancy
Speaker 1: language showed up that I don't understand. First time I
Speaker 1: see the word, I ignored. The second time I see
Speaker 1: the word I ignored. If I see a technical word
Speaker 1: that's three, three or four times in the book, I
Speaker 1: look it up, and then every time I see it
Speaker 1: from that point on, I just say the definitional out
Speaker 1: loud right instead of reading the word, I read the
Speaker 1: definition until it starts to stick. And the reason is
Speaker 1: just by learning those definitions, you start to learn huge, huge,
Speaker 1: massive amounts about the subject, and then you have the
Speaker 1: overarching history. But here's the most important thing, and this
Speaker 1: is the secret to learning. When you're read in a book,
Speaker 1: pay attention to what I call your emotional wows, those
Speaker 1: curiosity moments where you go, what the hell are that's
Speaker 1: so cool and its ideas start firing. The reason is
Speaker 1: this curiosity is neurobiologically a little bit of dopamine and
Speaker 1: a little bit of aura up and effort. Those are
Speaker 1: the two neurochemicals that appear in the brain that help
Speaker 1: produce the sensation of curiosity. But they do something else.
Speaker 1: They prime learning. When they're in our brain, we have
Speaker 1: a much easier time remembering what we're learning. So write
Speaker 1: down this is what The only thing I really take
Speaker 1: notes on when I read are my emotional wows. Oh.
Speaker 1: On page seventy seven, here's this really cool idea about
Speaker 1: pattern recognition and the brain, and it reminds me of
Speaker 1: blob blah blah. I follow my curiosity that way, I
Speaker 1: remember it. I follow my brain through a subject as
Speaker 1: long as you follow your curiosity through a subject. Now,
Speaker 1: by the way, this is not how you master a
Speaker 1: subject to pass a test in college. This is not
Speaker 1: going to help you there. This is like actual, real, practical,
Speaker 1: real world applicable knowledge that you can do shit with
Speaker 1: passing a test. You have requirements for that test. This
Speaker 1: will help. But if you're reading Ethan Frome in college
Speaker 1: and they're going to ask you, you may want to
Speaker 1: write down more than just the emotional wows.
Speaker 2: Okay, so caveat there.
Speaker 1: But this will really really help because by following our curiosity,
Speaker 1: We're following our natural learning software. That's how I do it.
Speaker 1: The other thing that I always point out to people
Speaker 1: because people make this mistake. I don't know if it's
Speaker 1: that we were taught this in school or we just
Speaker 1: assume this because it seems like Cummings says, don't always
Speaker 1: need to understand everything. Learning means being uncertain. The internal
Speaker 1: experience of learning for everyone, everybody in the world is.
Speaker 2: I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck.
Speaker 1: Oh look I don't suck anymore, right, that's the experience
Speaker 1: of it. In fact, my buddy Andrew Youuman is a
Speaker 1: Stanford neuroscientist, we do a lot of work with. He says,
Speaker 1: you know, he does a lot of work with the
Speaker 1: Navy Seals, and he says, you know, one of the
Speaker 1: things that peak performers, especially a speck ops guys, know
Speaker 1: that everybody else doesn't is that peak performance it's always crawl, walk, run,
Speaker 1: And the biggest difference is between peak performers and everybody else,
Speaker 1: is that peak performers know this, and everybody else show
Speaker 1: up and they're like, dude, man, I don't crawl. I
Speaker 1: don't even walk. I'm going to figure out what the
Speaker 1: shortcut is. I'm going to start by a jog, right,
Speaker 1: And peak performers show up and they're like, you know what, Okay,
Speaker 1: I got to crawl. Then I'm gonna walk, and then
Speaker 1: maybe I'll run. And it's gonna suck. I suck, I suck,
Speaker 1: I suck, I suck, and there's nothing to do but
Speaker 1: to do it. And it's funny because you see these
Speaker 1: top performers and we often think, oh my god, there's
Speaker 1: so far ahead of the of us.
Speaker 2: How did they get there.
Speaker 1: One of the main ways they got there is every
Speaker 1: time they're faced with the challenge, they know it's going
Speaker 1: to suck, and they just don't care.
Speaker 2: They just lean right in.
Speaker 1: The rest of us when face for the challenge, we
Speaker 1: dither around for a while. We're eventually going to rise
Speaker 1: to the challenge and do the thing. You've got to
Speaker 1: get it done, sooner or later.
Speaker 2: You got to.
Speaker 1: But most of us are like, oh, really, let me
Speaker 1: call my brother and Tello about all the shit.
Speaker 2: I got it.
Speaker 1: You know, we do all that, but peak performers just like, nope,
Speaker 1: crawl walk round.
Speaker 2: I'm just going to lean in immediately.
Speaker 4: That's great, So listener in thinking about all of that
Speaker 4: and the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you
Speaker 4: were going to isolate just one top insight or thing
Speaker 4: to do that you're taking away, what would it be?
Speaker 4: Remember that, little by little, a little becomes a lot,
Speaker 4: and a habit for me that has a crude and
Speaker 4: benefit over time is meditation. However, one of the things
Speaker 4: that gets in our way of building a steady meditation
Speaker 4: practice is that very striving. Right. Of course, course we're
Speaker 4: doing it because we want certain benefits, but in the
Speaker 4: moment of actually meditating, we need to let striving go
Speaker 4: and focus on just being there and experiencing it no
Speaker 4: matter what's happening. It becomes not enjoyable because I'm trying
Speaker 4: to make something happen some special moment. We want to
Speaker 4: let go of that. So if you want to stop
Speaker 4: dreading meditation and actually find it enjoyable, check out my
Speaker 4: free meditation guide at Goodwolf dot me slash Calm. I
Speaker 4: think what you just said there is a great place
Speaker 4: for us to wrap up the conversation, which is really
Speaker 4: that idea of crawl, walk run. I talk about it
Speaker 4: all the time on the show. We just talk about
Speaker 4: this idea of you know, sometime we've got to be
Speaker 4: willing to take baby steps. We've got to start where
Speaker 4: we are and move through the progression.
Speaker 2: I gotta tell you something.
Speaker 1: I think it's all baby steps, but you've just got
Speaker 1: to be willing to continue to take baby steps. One
Speaker 1: of the things I tell people this isn't a one
Speaker 1: hundred percent drew, but as a general rule, because of
Speaker 1: emotional set points, if you've sort of survive being a teenager,
Speaker 1: you've already felt just about the worst that life can
Speaker 1: offer you. I'm not saying you can't have that bad
Speaker 1: feeling for days and days and weeks and months on ends,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, But emostion those set points
Speaker 1: are sort of set up by around you know, ten
Speaker 1: or eleven or twelve, by like bad experiences, good experiences,
Speaker 1: and most of life takes place in between. And then
Speaker 1: you get teenagers where your hormones are raging and you
Speaker 1: have no control of your emotions. So honestly, again, as
Speaker 1: I said earlier, unless there's the death of a child,
Speaker 1: the chronic unemployment, which can change this, as a general rule,
Speaker 1: if you've survived being a teenager, you've suffered the worst
Speaker 1: that you're going to suffer on any peak performerce Path
Speaker 1: taking those baby steps, which is a strange thing to realize,
Speaker 1: but it seems to be biologically true.
Speaker 4: Awesome, Well, Stephen, thank you so much. I found the
Speaker 4: book absolutely fascinating, and as I said, I took so
Speaker 4: many notes my curiosity points of things that jumped off
Speaker 4: the page, because that's the way I prepare for these interviews.
Speaker 4: What excited me, There were a ton of them.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you, I appreciate that.
Speaker 4: Thanks so much for taking the time to come on
Speaker 4: the show. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Well my pleasure.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
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