Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest. He will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast. Today,
Speaker 1: it's great to chat with Stephen Kotler on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Stephen is a New York Times bestselling author and award
Speaker 1: winning journalist and the executive director of the Full Research Collective.
Speaker 1: He is one of the world's leading experts on human performance.
Speaker 1: Is the author of nine bestsellers out of thirteen books total,
Speaker 1: including The Art of Impossible, The Future Is Faster Than
Speaker 1: You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, and Bowld
Speaker 1: and Abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pultzer Prizes,
Speaker 1: translated into over forty languages, and appeared in over one
Speaker 1: hundred publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic
Speaker 1: Monthly Time, and the Harvard Business Review. Stephen is also
Speaker 1: the co host of Flull Research Collective Radio. Along with
Speaker 1: his wife, author Joy Nicholson, he's the co founder of
Speaker 1: the Rancho de Chiowawa Hospice and Special Needs Dog Sanctuary. Steven,
Speaker 1: what a true pleasure this is going to be to
Speaker 1: chat with you today. God, it's great to be with you.
Speaker 1: This book that you've published. First of all, congratulations in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways. Would you say it's kind of
Speaker 1: like your magnum opus. Would that be fair to say
Speaker 1: that up to this point? In invert like you brought
Speaker 1: that up a while ago, a month two months ago,
Speaker 1: you asked me a similar question. And I've literally been
Speaker 1: thinking about it ever since because it wasn't intentionally that book,
Speaker 1: but it is. There's thirty years of research by all
Speaker 1: everything I've studied over him, as like in my entire
Speaker 1: racibook career, it's in there. Is there? Yeah? And I
Speaker 1: didn't actually realize that I'm too you when you said that,
Speaker 1: because I think you use the word magnamobus or something
Speaker 1: like that. I was sort of like stunned by that.
Speaker 1: I was like, really, huh, what's he looking at? And
Speaker 1: I looked and I was like, oh crap, he's right
Speaker 1: kind of right? How is it not? Is the question, Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I know, I actually think I actually think you're you know,
Speaker 1: better or worse. Right, I think you're gonna be a
Speaker 1: bagnomobus that the world has to like it first or
Speaker 1: something like that. So that that's still debatable. I guess
Speaker 1: it is thirty years of research, right, thirty years of
Speaker 1: psychology and neuroscience and my own you know, weird weirdness
Speaker 1: turned into one thing, yeah for sure. So yeah, huge
Speaker 1: gratulations and I wish it a great success. But just
Speaker 1: tracing the development of your own thinking about this topic,
Speaker 1: because you, you know, you wrote about extreme sports and
Speaker 1: then you you expanded and you looked at everyone and
Speaker 1: how can everyone the person who's not trying to be
Speaker 1: an extreme sports athlete, but how in their daily life
Speaker 1: can they kind of get into that very similar flows state? Right?
Speaker 1: And then this one is even broader than flow. It's
Speaker 1: it's high performance more broadly in all the many different
Speaker 1: facets and things that interleave. When that, how's your own
Speaker 1: thinking on this topic changed your whole thinking on human potential?
Speaker 1: I would say, most broadly, how has that changed since
Speaker 1: you first started writing about this topic? A good hard question.
Speaker 1: So when I think about what went into the art impossible.
Speaker 1: There are like three or four sort of developmental stages
Speaker 1: problems I was trying to solve questions I was trying
Speaker 1: to answer. One of them is the was was because
Speaker 1: flow as a state of optimal performance, amplifies motivation and
Speaker 1: grit and productivity and creativity and learn all these subcategories.
Speaker 1: If I wanted to be an expert at flow, I
Speaker 1: had to understand how did these things work and how
Speaker 1: do they relate to flow? And you know, there's millions
Speaker 1: of experts in each of those subcategories. You're one of
Speaker 1: the world's leading experts on creativity. You've probably forgotten more
Speaker 1: about creativity than I'm ever going to know. But the
Speaker 1: one thing that I managed to notice is that when
Speaker 1: you're looking at all this stuff, because it's flow, and
Speaker 1: it captures all of it, like, oh wow, it's all
Speaker 1: a system, it's a sequence, it's a process. Of course,
Speaker 1: it is with biological organisms, and all of these components
Speaker 1: are linked together, and they're meant to work together, and
Speaker 1: they were meant to work apparently by the science in
Speaker 1: a particular order, et cetera, et cetera. That was that
Speaker 1: took a really that's a weird perspective, and it took
Speaker 1: a while to sort of develop that. I was that
Speaker 1: all these components that tons of people were looking at
Speaker 1: and sort of writing books about, right, they're great books
Speaker 1: on focus and grit and flow and creativity and learn
Speaker 1: all that stuff, that they were all part of one system.
Speaker 1: That was it that emerged over time was part one.
Speaker 1: And the second thing that emerged over time that was
Speaker 1: very complimentary was the idea that you know, I've been
Speaker 1: training people in flow and how to lives flow for
Speaker 1: a lot of years, twenty years at this point, some
Speaker 1: very very long period of time, and I've trained a
Speaker 1: tremendous amount of people. And flow is you know, when
Speaker 1: you start with the neuroscience, it's kind of remarkably easy
Speaker 1: to train, but it is not that that heightened amount
Speaker 1: of flow that you can get people in their life.
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem to be sustainable for everybody. And you
Speaker 1: know when, first of all, when you're what you're doing
Speaker 1: is you're selling courses that will help people achieve more
Speaker 1: flow in your life, and they're getting a bunch more flow,
Speaker 1: and then suddenly they start dropping out a flow like flies.
Speaker 1: You have very angry customers, and you know what I
Speaker 1: mean like frustrated people on top of everything else. And
Speaker 1: so I was looking at why is that the case?
Speaker 1: And I started to realize it was very very clear
Speaker 1: that its flow is one part of it. But the
Speaker 1: whole puzzle is if you haven't trained up learning skills
Speaker 1: or creativity skills, or the motivation skills or the grit
Speaker 1: skills or whatever the subcategories are the stuff that flow
Speaker 1: is going to amplify. Even though flow will amplify them,
Speaker 1: you don't have a strong enough foundation to sustain the amplification.
Speaker 1: If you don't know how to learn blow demands the
Speaker 1: challenge skills balance that you push your skills to the
Speaker 1: utmost constantly To do that. That requires learning all the time.
Speaker 1: So you're learning and you're growing. If you don't have
Speaker 1: good foundational learning skills, for example, really basic stuff like
Speaker 1: you were not you don't have a truth that the
Speaker 1: term I use a truth filter. My truth filder was
Speaker 1: journalism and investigative journalism. How do you find truth in there?
Speaker 1: Scientists have the scientific method. You know, Elon Musk talks
Speaker 1: about first principle thinking, but these are basically all ways
Speaker 1: of assessing information quickly, and so you know, do I
Speaker 1: trust it? Do I should? I not trust it? Right?
Speaker 1: And they facilitate rapid learning. If you don't have those
Speaker 1: kinds of skills, I can amplify a flow all you want,
Speaker 1: you can't sustain the amplification. So that was the second realization,
Speaker 1: is that you actually have to train all these things
Speaker 1: up at once if you really want the full turbo boost.
Speaker 1: And the third realization, this was the last one coming
Speaker 1: was and you, I'm sure came to these same and
Speaker 1: Maslow said years ago, is I'm sure you know whatever
Speaker 1: one can be, one must be. And what he's talking
Speaker 1: about is exactly what showed up in the research. If you,
Speaker 1: for example, when you look at intrinsic motivation, right, the
Speaker 1: big five intrinsic motivators that talk about our curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy,
Speaker 1: and master right, utilizing those gives you a huge boost
Speaker 1: and motivation, et cetera, et cetera, which you can use
Speaker 1: to go after high, hard goals, to go big. Right,
Speaker 1: that's the whole point of the book. But it turns
Speaker 1: out not going big, not trying to rise to our
Speaker 1: full potential, is horrible for us, psychologically horrible for us.
Speaker 1: And this was what was so shocking. I was looking
Speaker 1: at major causes of anxiety and depression, of which there
Speaker 1: are eight, and there are two that get all the attention, right,
Speaker 1: genetics and trauma. And yet if you look into the data,
Speaker 1: as you know, genetics is like a fifty percent cause
Speaker 1: of depression. It's always genetics and something else. And in
Speaker 1: terms of trauma, occasionally trauma does lead to post traumatic
Speaker 1: stress disorder, but the vast majority of the time and
Speaker 1: most of us, trauma leads to post traumatic growth. Right.
Speaker 1: The world breaks everyone, and many year stronger at the
Speaker 1: broken places, and that's what the research shows. But the
Speaker 1: other six causes of depression will give you one of
Speaker 1: the major ones lack of meaningful work. And what is
Speaker 1: lack of meaningful work? When you dig under the hood,
Speaker 1: it's work that you're not curious about, that you're not
Speaker 1: passionate about, that's not aligned with your purpose and your values,
Speaker 1: that you don't have autonomy to pursue your own interests in,
Speaker 1: and you don't have the opportunity for mastery, and it
Speaker 1: doesn't produce flow. That's what lack of meaningful work actually
Speaker 1: means in practice, right, And what that really means is
Speaker 1: lack of access to the neurobiological changes, curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery, actually,
Speaker 1: give you right, that's really what we're talking about as
Speaker 1: the causes. And that was the most shocking sort of
Speaker 1: finding in the end. That was when the urgency for
Speaker 1: the book started to like increase in my mind. I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, wow, this isn't just there isn't just
Speaker 1: a blueprint for how to go big. Not going big
Speaker 1: is bad for us. And maybe this has been widely
Speaker 1: known for a long time by a lot of people
Speaker 1: that I was the last to know. But like when
Speaker 1: I started, I remember the first time I was reading
Speaker 1: Lost Connections Careers, right about the eight major causes of depression,
Speaker 1: and that's where I as I was reading it, and
Speaker 1: it was four or five years ago, I was like, wow,
Speaker 1: these look really familiar. He looks everything I was reading.
Speaker 1: I was like, this is the inverse of exactly what
Speaker 1: I'm looking at on the peak performance side. And you know,
Speaker 1: of course it is, we're one biological organism that makes sense.
Speaker 1: But it was a kind of a shocking discovery in
Speaker 1: a sense. And I think those three lines of thinking
Speaker 1: are the lines of thinking that sort of led me
Speaker 1: in this direction. It was, of course there's been phenomenal
Speaker 1: neuroscience done on all these topics now too, and that's
Speaker 1: my thing. I want to take it. I love the psychology.
Speaker 1: I think the psychology incredibly useful, but most of the
Speaker 1: time it's metaphorical. It's not the thing. It's not mechanism.
Speaker 1: And I'm I think we can get the mechanism. Stuff
Speaker 1: becomes much more trainable, which is my only point. Trainable useful. Right,
Speaker 1: that's not better or at worse not you know, and
Speaker 1: I but it does seem to even more trainable, and
Speaker 1: that is what seems to matter. So like, yeah, those
Speaker 1: were the sort of big three insights. God did I
Speaker 1: talk for a long time to answer that question. I apologize, No,
Speaker 1: no problem, that those are great insights training. I feel
Speaker 1: like there's a lot of pressure to try to train
Speaker 1: flow because people are paying money and and they're expecting,
Speaker 1: you know, just get me into the full sted. I'm
Speaker 1: paying you money, so get me in the and so
Speaker 1: I feel like there's gonna be a lot of pressure
Speaker 1: on you, you know, be like, well, it's does not
Speaker 1: that it doesn't work like that. If I mean, that'd
Speaker 1: be great that if that works like that, then then
Speaker 1: all the top one percent billionaires would automatically be in
Speaker 1: flow more than Yeah, exactly, I would. I would I'd
Speaker 1: be out of a job, right, yeah, yeah, there wouldn't
Speaker 1: be a need a need for me. But I will
Speaker 1: say all this stuff, flow turned out to be a
Speaker 1: lot more reliable and repeatable than I think anybody suspected
Speaker 1: back in the nineties when we were trying to like
Speaker 1: if you look at Susan Jackson's work flow in sports,
Speaker 1: for example, where there's a really good breakdown of her
Speaker 1: frustrations and trying to teach top athletes how to drop
Speaker 1: in the flow, and you know, the hit rate is
Speaker 1: it's not great. And yet we're using the same exact
Speaker 1: tool she was using to mestra flow pre and post
Speaker 1: and we're seeing reliably on the back end of our
Speaker 1: training is like a seventy percent boost and flow. And
Speaker 1: I don't think it's that our kung fu is so
Speaker 1: bad ass. It's that things have gotten down to the
Speaker 1: neurobiology and biology scales. Right. It shared between all of us,
Speaker 1: evolutions shaped us all this way, and you get down
Speaker 1: to that level, I think it's much more effective for
Speaker 1: all kinds of people. Well, you know, in your book,
Speaker 1: you say biology scales. Personality doesn't What does that catch
Speaker 1: phrase mean? So Steve color catchphrase? I love just Steve
Speaker 1: a Coultler catch phrase. I guess you've got a lot
Speaker 1: of those. You got a lot of those, and I
Speaker 1: quote them. You have another one. Flow is the most
Speaker 1: addictive thing in the world. You know, I love your
Speaker 1: catch phrases. But yeah, explain that one. I can go
Speaker 1: longer on this, but let me give you this short version.
Speaker 1: You can. You can poke at it however you want,
Speaker 1: really really often in p performance and coaching very much
Speaker 1: when you start moving into this self help, you know,
Speaker 1: the sort of the less science based stuff. What you
Speaker 1: see is people figure out what works for themselves and
Speaker 1: they try to teach it to other people. And as
Speaker 1: a general rule, it doesn't work. And I learned this
Speaker 1: lesson the real hard way. But as a general rule,
Speaker 1: it doesn't work. And the reason it doesn't work is
Speaker 1: personality has a huge influence on how any person should
Speaker 1: approach peak performance. For example, where you are on the
Speaker 1: introversion to extraversion scale, or what are your risk tolerances?
Speaker 1: Those are huge important foundational questions, and there's created those
Speaker 1: are personality questions. Right, your risk tolerances these are genetically
Speaker 1: hardwired at or established by really early childhood experience. Now
Speaker 1: the research says you can change them. You can become
Speaker 1: more risk friendly, miss risk tolerance over but it's like
Speaker 1: trying to change a character trait. You can do it.
Speaker 1: We didn't used to think we could. Now we know
Speaker 1: you can, but it seems to be very very slow,
Speaker 1: takes a long time, doesn't happen easily. So, for example,
Speaker 1: my early career as a journalist and especially covering action
Speaker 1: sports and other things I was covering in both journalism
Speaker 1: and action sports. For the people I was around, if
Speaker 1: you were not literally nearly dying once a month or
Speaker 1: something like that, you weren't doing your job. That was
Speaker 1: just a typical normal day in the life of this.
Speaker 1: And this was almost everybody I knew. I thought this
Speaker 1: was normal. My risk tolerances are crazy. So when I
Speaker 1: learned a little bit about flow and peak performance and
Speaker 1: got cocky, and you know, I like people believe me.
Speaker 1: I was writing for blog for Psychology today, I had
Speaker 1: books on the New York Times. You know, people believe me.
Speaker 1: And I was trying to teach people this is what
Speaker 1: worked for me. Do this, do this, do this. I
Speaker 1: put a guy in the hospital. I nearly caused it
Speaker 1: the force. One of my friends still isn't talking to me.
Speaker 1: It's been twenty years. Like it was, I mean, a
Speaker 1: mess of people's lives, and I was really I was like,
Speaker 1: what the hell went wrong? Because this stuff I knew,
Speaker 1: this stuff works so well. And that was where that
Speaker 1: insight sort of came from. I was like, whoa personality.
Speaker 1: There's too much stuff that is individual that affects how
Speaker 1: you make foundational peak performance decisions. That's individual. You can't
Speaker 1: what works for me is not going to work for
Speaker 1: you. You You can't train it that way. It's dangerous, it's
Speaker 1: not helpful to the people you're teaching biology. If you
Speaker 1: get things down to hey, there are seven foundational emotional
Speaker 1: systems that are found in all mammals, including humans. They
Speaker 1: work this way. They have each neuro different neurotransmitters, different
Speaker 1: networks in the brain, et cetera, et cetera. When that
Speaker 1: is conserved among not just all humans, but all species.
Speaker 1: So when you take things to that level, you can
Speaker 1: be sure it's going to work for everybody because it's shared,
Speaker 1: it's conserved, it's not altered by early childhood experience and
Speaker 1: you know, individual genetics and things like that. So that's
Speaker 1: what I mean by personality doesn't scale in biology scales, gotcha. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I like that you acknowledge that personality traits really
Speaker 1: do make a difference in terms of this. And I've
Speaker 1: been thinking about the role of personality differences and extent
Speaker 1: to which things are possible for you, and it seems
Speaker 1: like confidence is a big one. And I feel like
Speaker 1: confidence or self efficacy needs to be earned in order
Speaker 1: to be most effective, at least, that you need to
Speaker 1: have some sense that you're So yeah, I'm so glad
Speaker 1: you said this. So I've been this is you're talking
Speaker 1: about confidence, but it's also truin grit. So in trying
Speaker 1: to train people to be gritty, there's actually two stages
Speaker 1: to the process. There's first you have to go out
Speaker 1: and let's say it's physical grit, right, You're trying to
Speaker 1: get grittier physically, which, by the way, the research says
Speaker 1: is if you want to be grittier cognitively or emotionally
Speaker 1: or whatever, start physically. It's the one skill that it
Speaker 1: does seem that training it physically first work helps, But
Speaker 1: first you have to push a little bit harder today
Speaker 1: on your workout, and then you have to do it
Speaker 1: again tomorrow, and then you have to do it the
Speaker 1: day after, and the day after you have to do
Speaker 1: the actual work. That's not even the issue. The issue
Speaker 1: is you yourself have to trust yourself to do the work.
Speaker 1: Meaning you're you're there's a there's a gap, right, you don't.
Speaker 1: It's not just I'm gritty enough to do it. It's
Speaker 1: I have the confidence in my grit so that I
Speaker 1: know going into any situation, I've got this extra in
Speaker 1: the tank. Right. That is so, And it's tricky because
Speaker 1: it's a different thing. I'll give you a simple example
Speaker 1: from again physical, but this is a this is a
Speaker 1: different if you break a bone. If you're an action
Speaker 1: sport athlete and you break a bone, it's really common.
Speaker 1: The recovery may take six months, six months to nine
Speaker 1: months for the broken ban, but psychologically your body will govern.
Speaker 1: We'll put a governor on your ability to move its
Speaker 1: speed or to go full out. It'll take about a
Speaker 1: year year and a half to get over this. The
Speaker 1: unconscious governor on your behavior that your that your brain
Speaker 1: is layering in because your brain no longer trusts you
Speaker 1: to operate at highst at that speed without damaging the
Speaker 1: vessel kind of thing. And you have to re earn
Speaker 1: the trust of the adaptive a conscious in the sense,
Speaker 1: which is an odd thing, but it seems to be
Speaker 1: very true. We earn the trust of the cognito unconscious. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's a really good point. And now, as
Speaker 1: we talked a lot of it sometimes about that mismatch
Speaker 1: between conscious self esteem and unconscious self esteem. I mean,
Speaker 1: what if you have this conscious sort of confidence imposturing,
Speaker 1: but you feel in your gut like you're an impostor.
Speaker 1: That's got to be a mismatch. You need to reconcile psychoanalytically. Right.
Speaker 1: It was funny. I was talking a good friend of
Speaker 1: mine this morning, and he is literally one of the
Speaker 1: toughest martial artists on the planet, literally, like widely acknowledged
Speaker 1: one of the toughest martial artists on the planet. He's
Speaker 1: having difficulties in his relationship and we were talking about it,
Speaker 1: and we're talking about the fact that it doesn't literally
Speaker 1: matter that he's one of the toughest guys on the
Speaker 1: planet when he gets in a fight with his girlfriend.
Speaker 1: He's the you know, the five year old kid who
Speaker 1: got bullied at home and bullied at school, and he
Speaker 1: became one of the toughest guys on the planet in
Speaker 1: reaction to that. But when he's in that argument, he
Speaker 1: doesn't feel like a super powerful human being, which he
Speaker 1: literally is by eddy like any clear measurement device, he's
Speaker 1: literally a five year old kid. And we all like,
Speaker 1: we know this. This is that you know Navy seal
Speaker 1: that famous Greek saying that the Navy Seals live by,
Speaker 1: which is we don't rise to the level occasion, we
Speaker 1: sink to the level of our training. And it's because
Speaker 1: what you know what I mean, I turn up the
Speaker 1: norapinefforn in your brain. I make you more fearful and
Speaker 1: more anxious. Your brain goes, oh problem, I want simple solutions.
Speaker 1: What worked back when I was five. Okay, let's go
Speaker 1: for that. And that's essentially what we're up against, right,
Speaker 1: and that's what we're trying to. Like, so when you
Speaker 1: talk about confidence, it's not all the stuff you build
Speaker 1: on top of the like the like broken structure that
Speaker 1: you started with. It's literally you got to fix the
Speaker 1: broken structure you started with, because that's the ultimate weak
Speaker 1: link in the chain. I love that story with the
Speaker 1: Marshal artists. I just love that. It was a really
Speaker 1: crazy I mean, you know, we were laughing about I've
Speaker 1: known this guy forever, but he's like, he's like, dude,
Speaker 1: google me. People are scared of me. And yet I
Speaker 1: was like, I know, So, what is the difference between
Speaker 1: lower lower eye impossible and capital I impossible? Great question.
Speaker 1: My whole career has been spent essentially studying those moments
Speaker 1: in time when people accomplished CAPITALI impossible. They did what
Speaker 1: that which has never been done. I did this in
Speaker 1: in action sports. We've been talking about that, but I
Speaker 1: you know, even for Wired, in the New York Times magazine,
Speaker 1: a lot of those magazines you listed. My beat was
Speaker 1: be in the room when sci fi idea has become
Speaker 1: science fact technology, when the first world's first artificial vision
Speaker 1: implant is turned on and the very first blind person
Speaker 1: gets to see again, when the first private spaceship leaves Earth,
Speaker 1: the thing that NASA said was impossible, et cetera. I
Speaker 1: was in all those rooms trying to figure out, Hey,
Speaker 1: how the hell is this possible? Right? That was sort
Speaker 1: of what I was doing. And that's capital I impossible,
Speaker 1: that which has never been done. And it turns out
Speaker 1: that I didn't meet anybody who set out to accomplish
Speaker 1: capital ie impossible. Right, everybody I met set out to
Speaker 1: accomplish what I call small eye impossible. And that's what
Speaker 1: art impossible was really about. Small eye impossible is that
Speaker 1: which we think is impossible for ourselves, right the end,
Speaker 1: the end of our expectations for ourselves. Where's our limit?
Speaker 1: And this could be growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, man,
Speaker 1: I want to be a right when I was five
Speaker 1: years old, clearly, when I was a blue collar steel
Speaker 1: mill pound, I didn't know any writers and not how
Speaker 1: you became a writer. I didn't like other than like
Speaker 1: putting words together. I could even spell, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean? Like I didn't have I had no clue
Speaker 1: it was a small i I possible? Why because there's
Speaker 1: no clear path between point A and point b. And statistically,
Speaker 1: crap Odds is six tess right, what is another small
Speaker 1: I impossible? Rising out of poverty, overcoming deep trauma, becoming
Speaker 1: world class at anything you do, getting paid for what
Speaker 1: you love. In fact, I think the first small eye impossible.
Speaker 1: The longer I've thought about it, I think the first
Speaker 1: small I impossible And I think almost everybody solves this
Speaker 1: one is getting a first kiss. Do you remember when
Speaker 1: you were like eleven or twelve and you just discovered,
Speaker 1: you know, that there were attractive people in the world
Speaker 1: that you might be interested in it? You were like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, how do I what do I? I mean, like,
Speaker 1: that's the that's how small I impossible? How the hell
Speaker 1: do I do this thing that matters so much to me? Right,
Speaker 1: that's a small eye impossible and the thing that I
Speaker 1: found over and over and over again. And I'll give
Speaker 1: you a story that exemplifies this in a second. But
Speaker 1: is that the only way you get to capitol I impossible?
Speaker 1: It is small lie impossible after small ie impossible after
Speaker 1: small impossible. In fact, when you get to capital impossible,
Speaker 1: often for the person on the inside doing it, they
Speaker 1: don't even notice. To them, it's just what's next. They're
Speaker 1: just having breakfast, They're doing the thing that's in front
Speaker 1: of them. It's everybody else who's looking at it and
Speaker 1: going no way, man. And here's the classic story about
Speaker 1: this is part of the action sports story. I know
Speaker 1: it's a psychology podcast, but I think this is a
Speaker 1: great one. The very first time I talked to Laird Hamilton.
Speaker 1: I met him. He was thirty three. I was twenty seven.
Speaker 1: He was just starting to tow into jaws. So at
Speaker 1: that point he was sort of the widely acknowledged toughest
Speaker 1: guy on the planet doing the most impossible thing anybody'd
Speaker 1: ever seen, towing to these monster waves. And I remember
Speaker 1: talking to Himbout and he says, Stephen, you know the
Speaker 1: funniest thing about this is people look at me and
Speaker 1: they see me on a fifty foot wave and they think,
Speaker 1: oh my god, Laird, that that is just it's impossible.
Speaker 1: There's no way I could never do that. It's totally impossible. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're looking at me, I'm thirty three years old. They
Speaker 1: see them in this fifty foot wave. They think it's impossible.
Speaker 1: They didn't see me at three years old on a
Speaker 1: three foot wave. They didn't see me at four on
Speaker 1: a four foot wave, they didn't see me at five
Speaker 1: on a five foot wave, and they didn't see me
Speaker 1: last week on a forty nine and a half footwave.
Speaker 1: So they see the fifty foot wave and think, oh
Speaker 1: my god, how do you do that? And I think, well, laired,
Speaker 1: I don't know six inches more than you did. Last week.
Speaker 1: Maybe you're not pushing hard enough. That's what it's like
Speaker 1: on the inside versus all on the ausid And that's
Speaker 1: what I kept finding over and over and over again,
Speaker 1: and it'd be really odd, like you people would accomplish
Speaker 1: it a a possible and some of them wouldn't even notice,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like growing up in this
Speaker 1: acts sports community, we're not growing up but reporting on it.
Speaker 1: It's one thing when you see impossible on TV, when
Speaker 1: you or you hear about you read about it. It's
Speaker 1: another thing when you go drinking with somebody on Friday
Speaker 1: night and then you get up Saturday morning and go
Speaker 1: out into the mountains and they do something that, for
Speaker 1: all of recorded history has never been done and it's
Speaker 1: not supposed to ever be done. That's a very That's
Speaker 1: not some dude on a screen. That's just the guy
Speaker 1: you were out with the night before. That demands a
Speaker 1: totally different kind of explanation, you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: that's no longer Oh my god. You're like, it's sort
Speaker 1: of in your face in a way that is really
Speaker 1: like it's a visceral puzzle. You're like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: I was how does that happen? It's and that's so
Speaker 1: that there was a different kind of experience of it. Also,
Speaker 1: it's cool, man, that's really cool. Yeah yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: how do you like? What? What have you failed at
Speaker 1: in your life? Oh? My god? So let's just talk
Speaker 1: about the experience of writing, because I often think about this.
Speaker 1: I think the experience of writing a book is almost
Speaker 1: constant failure because you write something today, you think it's awesome,
Speaker 1: You come back tomorrow and you're like, oh, crap, it's
Speaker 1: not as good as I thought it was. Let me
Speaker 1: fix it. And you fix it. And then you write
Speaker 1: something else and you think, oh, this is I got
Speaker 1: it and nailed and come back the next day and
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, this is this is just crap, I
Speaker 1: didn't do my job. I'll let me fix that. I
Speaker 1: think writing a book is I mean, I can give
Speaker 1: you a long list of things that I failed at,
Speaker 1: but I really think that almost any creative project is
Speaker 1: the experience of disappointing yourself over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: And you get it right, but you get it right
Speaker 1: at the very end, and you know it's not a
Speaker 1: real right. You know, you're just you're like, Okay, it's done,
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to look at it for a while.
Speaker 1: I'm and turn it in. But you know, if you
Speaker 1: came back in three months, it wouldn't be done, It
Speaker 1: wouldn't be right, it wouldn't be finished, because that's the
Speaker 1: nature of a creator, being a creative project, that little
Speaker 1: dissatisfied itch. So I think failure in any serious creative
Speaker 1: life is constant, and I think the same thing is
Speaker 1: true in any you know, I'm not a scientist PhD
Speaker 1: by training, but I do science research all the time,
Speaker 1: and I think science research is also that like how
Speaker 1: many things did you think we're absolutely true? That you
Speaker 1: later some of them you yourself proved yourself wrong? You
Speaker 1: know what I mean. It's these are both very like
Speaker 1: I'm bling you must sort of look at your failures
Speaker 1: all the time, professions. So I mean, I've failed on
Speaker 1: so many, so many different Like what haven't I failed
Speaker 1: at is a better question, You're how many best selling
Speaker 1: books you can fill those? Agreed? Agreed? But I've like
Speaker 1: I've had books that have vanished into the ether as well, right,
Speaker 1: like all that stuff you know we all have. I've
Speaker 1: had magazine articles that I spent a year working on
Speaker 1: that got killed at the last minute. You know, that's
Speaker 1: a that's a crazy thing. You put a year of
Speaker 1: your life into something and something happens in the news
Speaker 1: and something you know, the story gets shut down. I mean,
Speaker 1: over and over and over again. I just don't. I'm
Speaker 1: very resilient in that. Like whatever you do to me,
Speaker 1: I'm going to wake up the next day and I'm
Speaker 1: going to try to take whatever that crap feeling is
Speaker 1: and I'm going to try to turn it into words.
Speaker 1: I'm going to do something. How I process pain in
Speaker 1: anything is by turning it into works, right and turning
Speaker 1: into art. So I say this in art of impossible.
Speaker 1: I think it's really true. Anybody who's accomplished anything really
Speaker 1: hard in this life. Your passion is your salvation, but
Speaker 1: it's where you run to when you need to run.
Speaker 1: So the good, like I think my life has been shock,
Speaker 1: a block of failure and so and by the way,
Speaker 1: I always say, every successful person I've ever met is
Speaker 1: running away from something just as fast as they're running
Speaker 1: towards something. And that double motivation is really important. Here's
Speaker 1: a great, great, great phenomenal driver. It doesn't feel very good,
Speaker 1: but it's a great motivator. And so if you can
Speaker 1: work with it. You can get farther faster for a
Speaker 1: lot of reasons. Right, you get feareds as focused or free.
Speaker 1: I always create, Like whenever I write a book, I
Speaker 1: always have a writing problem in the book that scares me.
Speaker 1: I'm always doing going after like it's not visible to anybody,
Speaker 1: you know, from the outside, you would never know it
Speaker 1: was a challenge, I said for myself. But it's something
Speaker 1: that scares me because I know I'm going to have
Speaker 1: a little more focused every time I go to write
Speaker 1: because it scares me. Well, it seems like with you
Speaker 1: have you pair fear with the confidence to still act,
Speaker 1: the or the bravery? Shall we say to still act?
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say the fear in it so itself is
Speaker 1: a great motivator. It usually makes people avoid things unless
Speaker 1: it's paired also with this additional thing confidence to act
Speaker 1: like bravery. Yeah, so I like it's interesting because I've
Speaker 1: had a lot of conversations in and around bravery. Also,
Speaker 1: bravery is literally you do it in spite of how
Speaker 1: it feels. Right. I used to think when I was
Speaker 1: younger that like courage and bravery meant like you didn't
Speaker 1: feel the fear, like I was like, God, I don't
Speaker 1: have any courage. I'm not brave. I'm terrified all the time.
Speaker 1: And it turns out, no, actually bravery, courage is just
Speaker 1: about feeling it and doing it anyways. And I'm really
Speaker 1: good at that. And the only reason I'm really good
Speaker 1: at that is because I discovered very early on in
Speaker 1: my career, in my life that on the other side
Speaker 1: of my fear are all the stuff I want, all like,
Speaker 1: all the great joys, all of my superpowers, all of
Speaker 1: that stuff is on the other side of the fear.
Speaker 1: That's what I know. So I know that like, no
Speaker 1: matter how awful it feels, and awful it feels, to
Speaker 1: go right at it. And it's never easy. And I
Speaker 1: have no confidence if zero is a very little confidence
Speaker 1: going into a lot of that stuff. All I know
Speaker 1: is that you get to where I want to go.
Speaker 1: I got to go in this direction. I look at
Speaker 1: fear as a great gift from the universe. I love
Speaker 1: that X. The way I talked about it, I've talked
Speaker 1: about it before is fear's a compass to me, and
Speaker 1: I think it's a compass to most top performers. And
Speaker 1: it's for this reason you just sort of figure out.
Speaker 1: You're like, oh, it feels terrible, but the thing I
Speaker 1: really think I want most is on the other side
Speaker 1: of this, so I gotta there's no there's no actual choice,
Speaker 1: right because running away from it the shame to me
Speaker 1: is totally unbearable. The fact that I like, can't like,
Speaker 1: didn't go at the thing. I don't like. If I fail,
Speaker 1: I fail. But if I didn't go at it, and
Speaker 1: I chose to live with that awful feeling, that is
Speaker 1: really difficult for me. That's I don't think it's confidence.
Speaker 1: I think it's that I think living with the fear
Speaker 1: and the shame is worse, and I know the things
Speaker 1: I want are on the other side of my fear.
Speaker 1: This is great. Those two things together it makes a
Speaker 1: lot of sense. You know, in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: A lot of that comes down to like vision, you know,
Speaker 1: like imagination, you can clearly see what's on the other side.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I think there's people different their quarity
Speaker 1: of vision, so it seems a little bit. That's what
Speaker 1: you're talking about, is charity of vision, and that is
Speaker 1: and I think that's a muscle. By the way, I
Speaker 1: just want to the thing I want to point out
Speaker 1: with vision, right, And I think you'd agree with me
Speaker 1: on this is it's you know, imagination whatever we want
Speaker 1: to call it, creativity. It's a muscle, and you have
Speaker 1: to train yourself to see a little farther out right. See,
Speaker 1: I know you've been getting square day. I know about
Speaker 1: your workout regimen. You know, I know your coaches, I do.
Speaker 1: And she's means mean in a good way, but the
Speaker 1: other she's showing me what's on the other side of fear. Yes,
Speaker 1: and it's really true. Right, you start pushing through those things.
Speaker 1: And that's the great I mean, one of the great
Speaker 1: lessons of action sports also is it's an environment that
Speaker 1: forces you to confront really basic fears. Speed. The body
Speaker 1: doesn't like going above certain speeds because bad things happen,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. And you are up against
Speaker 1: primal forces, but in a sort of controlled environment, like
Speaker 1: you don't get to control everything, but you can sort
Speaker 1: of can you can dose it right, You can say, okay,
Speaker 1: I can expose myself to this much, this much and
Speaker 1: this munch. And that's you know, there's a whole big
Speaker 1: chapter in art of impossible want to here's you know,
Speaker 1: how you go at risk and learn how to work
Speaker 1: with fear and things like that. I also tell people
Speaker 1: you don't want to start here. You don't want like
Speaker 1: there are five layers, six layers of grit that peak
Speaker 1: performers try to train. Here is like the fifth one
Speaker 1: end that I think people really start to work with
Speaker 1: because you do want the confidence, right, you're starting You
Speaker 1: pointed to your muscles, right, you want to if you're
Speaker 1: training grit and this kind of stuff, you want to
Speaker 1: start with the physical stuff, very simple, basic physical stuff,
Speaker 1: because we're physical bodied organisms, and somehow the brain seems
Speaker 1: to trust that process a little bit more and in
Speaker 1: a weird way. So, oh wow, I've got physical grit. Okay,
Speaker 1: now I can start to develop cognitive grit and then
Speaker 1: you can sort of move from there. And I think
Speaker 1: fear is something you're going to have to work with
Speaker 1: it and negotiate it along the way. But there's a
Speaker 1: point at which you're like, Okay, now I've got an
Speaker 1: enough stuff in there to really start training fear. I
Speaker 1: if you just jump right in and try to go
Speaker 1: head on at it, I think it's difficult for most people.
Speaker 1: I couldn't do it. I don't I know very few
Speaker 1: people every now and again you meet like a Navy
Speaker 1: seal guy or an action sports person where you're like,
Speaker 1: oh wow, you can just go right at that. I
Speaker 1: don't like, that's super rare in my experience. And that's
Speaker 1: a personality thing, not personality, doesn't scale. I don't think
Speaker 1: that's a biological thing. Right, boldness. It's a facet of
Speaker 1: psychopathy and right. And it also means your D two
Speaker 1: receptors are hell active. And you know, we could go
Speaker 1: on from there. Yeah, you like really getting it under
Speaker 1: the hood, don't you You know I do? Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I know you like that. You know, your discussion of
Speaker 1: grit in your book is really quite unique. You link
Speaker 1: things like mindfulness to grit, and you also talk about
Speaker 1: the dark side of grit. You know, can you just
Speaker 1: can you talk about some of this because I think
Speaker 1: in a lot of discussions of grit, you know, a
Speaker 1: lot of these things aren't really discussed. People seem to
Speaker 1: think of grit as strictly like what we would call perseverance, right, industriousness. Industriousness,
Speaker 1: and they don't like as resilience, for example, is a
Speaker 1: major component in grit, and resilience has very little to
Speaker 1: do with industrialness. And you know what I mean, Like
Speaker 1: resilience is a totally different category of thing. And so
Speaker 1: what I always say is the first grit school you
Speaker 1: have to you have to you's got to come in
Speaker 1: through the body, as we've been talking about, and I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm very wary. There's a lot of like the
Speaker 1: people who are really into embodied cognition and share the
Speaker 1: inactive vision of perception really tend there's a body chopinism
Speaker 1: that's sort of floating around, especially in the performance world
Speaker 1: in the coaching world, to hear a lot like don't
Speaker 1: even worry about the mind, everything is through the body.
Speaker 1: I just think that's idiotic. Like I'm a very cognitive dude.
Speaker 1: You want to teach me anything, you've got to come
Speaker 1: in through my brain, like coming in through my body
Speaker 1: as a resume for disaster, except with this grit skill.
Speaker 1: So I'm just saying that. But the second thing you
Speaker 1: have to train is the grit to control your thoughts.
Speaker 1: Absolutely the second grit skill, because if you thought without
Speaker 1: thought control, as we both know, the default mode network,
Speaker 1: what you call the imagination network, brilliantly is a wonderful
Speaker 1: ally provided you can get a grip on negative self rumination.
Speaker 1: If you can't get a grip on negative self rumination,
Speaker 1: your default mode network is going to kill you literally, right,
Speaker 1: It is literally going to drive you mad. It is
Speaker 1: the thing that will drive you mad. So I want
Speaker 1: to teach you to be creative later on in the book. Right,
Speaker 1: that's where it goes. I have to teach you to
Speaker 1: utilize your default mode network, because, as you know, that's
Speaker 1: how a lot creativity is going to get done. But
Speaker 1: I can't teach you that until you have basic thought
Speaker 1: control skills. If you're still taking every one of your
Speaker 1: thoughts personally, if you've got no separation between you know,
Speaker 1: what you could call emotion and feeling, right, emotion the
Speaker 1: internal signal and feeling the actual Oh this is sadness
Speaker 1: or whatever. You can't get into that gap, you're going
Speaker 1: to believe every one of your thoughts is real, is true,
Speaker 1: is accurate, and your brain's going to kick your ass
Speaker 1: over time, especially if you're trying to go after high
Speaker 1: art challenges, which is what the Art of Impossible is about.
Speaker 1: Why their high art challenges there. I just talked about
Speaker 1: writing a book as a constant experience of failure. You're
Speaker 1: wrong almost every day. You fail a little bit almost
Speaker 1: every day, and you get back up and you put
Speaker 1: more into it, and at the end you like the
Speaker 1: high art goal. A lot of people want to write
Speaker 1: a book. That's a that's a very common high art goal,
Speaker 1: and yet the experience is one of constant failure. If
Speaker 1: I couldn't control my thoughts when I got to the
Speaker 1: realization every morning that the thing I wrote yesterday that
Speaker 1: I thought was perfect is actually crappy, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to have to spend the next two hours rewriting it.
Speaker 1: That requires, right, It's going to require grit persistence, like
Speaker 1: I got to do the work. But if I can't
Speaker 1: control my thoughts, if I take it personally, if I
Speaker 1: think I'm a bad person, if I think I'm stupid,
Speaker 1: if I think I'm a failure, then I've got two problems, right,
Speaker 1: my bad writing. It's going to require I gotta lead
Speaker 1: it at my bad head, so I don't with grit skills.
Speaker 1: So little of it seems to be about the physical
Speaker 1: perseverance stuff that people so associated with, and so much
Speaker 1: with that and a lot of the later grit skills,
Speaker 1: like the grit to be your best when you're at
Speaker 1: your worst, and this was really one that was first
Speaker 1: pointed out to me. I got to give credit work
Speaker 1: credit was due. Josh Wadeskin was the one who identified
Speaker 1: this really clearly for me. He was we were talking
Speaker 1: about all the different grit skills that people should train.
Speaker 1: It's like the most important one in my opinion, and
Speaker 1: you also have to train it independently, and you do
Speaker 1: and what you have to. It's a confidence thing, like
Speaker 1: you literally have to create terrible conditions in your life
Speaker 1: and perform well in those terrible conditions. So you have
Speaker 1: to trust the confidence that when those conditions show up,
Speaker 1: you can kick ass right. And it's a different kind
Speaker 1: of muscle. It's a different kind of confidence. Is that
Speaker 1: a physical skill or a mental skill. I'll give you
Speaker 1: an example of my own life when I'm trying to
Speaker 1: learn a speech because I don't like I'm good at
Speaker 1: this stuff, but I'm good at it because I practice
Speaker 1: a lot. Because I'm actually I'm not that good at it.
Speaker 1: I'm normally intimidating in a lot of public speaking situations
Speaker 1: and things like that. And I'm the reason I'm confident
Speaker 1: is because I practice like mad and I will write
Speaker 1: a speech, I will do my speech. I will do
Speaker 1: my speech in front of friends. I will practice a
Speaker 1: practice and then THEO. I'll find a day where I
Speaker 1: didn't get enough sleep the night before, I have worked
Speaker 1: all day. I'll go to the gym, I'll work out.
Speaker 1: I'll come home, I'll grab my dogs and I'll go
Speaker 1: up the mountain behind my house and I'll give the speech.
Speaker 1: I'm exhausted I usually try to do when I have
Speaker 1: an E and I feel terrible right, like no blow chugging,
Speaker 1: my brain's not working. And if I can give the
Speaker 1: speech going up a mountain, then I can give the
Speaker 1: speech under any conditions, which is good because I in
Speaker 1: my speaking career there have been four or five or
Speaker 1: six times colossally important big rooms, lots of live bodies,
Speaker 1: lots of consequences, and things have gone horribly wrong, horribly wrong.
Speaker 1: Av systems have crashed, flies have gone away. I'm you know,
Speaker 1: there's no microphone anymore. I'm shouted, you know, blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: All those kinds of things happen all the time. Or
Speaker 1: I'm desperately ill, and you know, was up all the
Speaker 1: night before because there was some crying infant in the
Speaker 1: room next to me. You know what I mean? Like
Speaker 1: whatever it was. Those are tough conditions to be on
Speaker 1: stage in, and yet I need to know I can
Speaker 1: constantly deliver. So you got to train that muscle independently,
Speaker 1: because it's the confidence that you're training. You're not just
Speaker 1: training the grit to do it. The grit to do
Speaker 1: it is. It's one thing to know that you can
Speaker 1: do it. It's another thing to know that you've done
Speaker 1: it regularly and you have the confidence that when this
Speaker 1: stuff shows up in the real world, it's a skill
Speaker 1: you can rely on. Love it. May I add a
Speaker 1: grit to facet to all this. Let me know what
Speaker 1: you think of this. Try it, Try it on, Try
Speaker 1: it on the T shirt, and let me know if
Speaker 1: it fits. So. Paul Tillich, one of my favorite philosophers
Speaker 1: of religion, who Maslow and the humanistic psychologist Drew a
Speaker 1: lot On, wrote a really good book, The Courage to Be.
Speaker 1: Could we add like the grit to be? And what
Speaker 1: does that mean? What do I mean by that? I
Speaker 1: mean the In a lot of ways, it's the it's
Speaker 1: overcoming the fear of death, it's overcoming the the non existence,
Speaker 1: you know, the idea of the fear of not mattering.
Speaker 1: These sort of things. It's a very this is more
Speaker 1: of an existential grit that I just coined that on
Speaker 1: the spot. But do you know what I'm saying. I
Speaker 1: know what what I'm wondering is because the order of
Speaker 1: the book and the way the biology seems to set
Speaker 1: up is you want to sort of start with curiosity
Speaker 1: and go into passion, go into purpose right and you
Speaker 1: get to the grit skills later. And my question is,
Speaker 1: because I agree with what you just said very much,
Speaker 1: and I'm wondering, does that sort of get covered when
Speaker 1: you're figuring out what your passion is and what your
Speaker 1: purpose is like? Isn't that what we use to fight
Speaker 1: back against the existential dread? Isn't like isn't passion or
Speaker 1: purpose in a sense the grit to be? And maybe
Speaker 1: I'm wrong there. I couldn't like, I have no I
Speaker 1: think you made a great point. I think you're right,
Speaker 1: and I'm just trying to like expand on it a
Speaker 1: little bit. Cool, you know, I love you Your yes
Speaker 1: ending as they do in improv theater. I don't think
Speaker 1: it's exactly the same thing, but I'm happy. But I'd
Speaker 1: like to talk about I want to make sure I
Speaker 1: talk about passion, that you're you're the star of this
Speaker 1: show today. So in my you know, ideas I have,
Speaker 1: we can table for a second, because I do want
Speaker 1: to hear your ideas about passion, because you make a
Speaker 1: really good point in your book the passion is not
Speaker 1: an overnight process, and you actually like to conceptualize it
Speaker 1: more as pursuing a few of your intersecting curiosities. So
Speaker 1: that seems like a lot more manageable way for people
Speaker 1: to cultivate passion than just the idea of follow your
Speaker 1: passion that you hear a lot, right, Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: people get killed in this. Yeah, and you can send listeners.
Speaker 1: So we took that portion of the book. We made
Speaker 1: a really cool interactive PDF out of it, and it's
Speaker 1: passion recipe dot com. So nice. Anybody can go use that.
Speaker 1: That's out there. It's free, it's for everybody. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, let me big picture before we even get
Speaker 1: into the nitty gritty, because this is such a mistake
Speaker 1: that people make, and it just it's an awful feeling
Speaker 1: on the inside. But when I you know that everybody
Speaker 1: wants passion these days, it's big, it's mystical, and they
Speaker 1: don't even know why they want it right like, and
Speaker 1: I mean, why why does passion matter? Because it gives
Speaker 1: you focus for free Passion is nothing more neurochemically, this
Speaker 1: is Helen Fisher's work, not my work, than dope mean
Speaker 1: a norapend effort. It's focus, it's tension, excitement, it's engagement,
Speaker 1: the desire to make meaning. That's what passion is, right neurochemically,
Speaker 1: And what does it gives us focus for free? Well,
Speaker 1: that's just passion in general. That's any that's passion of
Speaker 1: an artist, that's romantic passion, that's just passion. By the way,
Speaker 1: curiosity is a little bit of orapid effort and a
Speaker 1: little bit of dope mean right when you say you
Speaker 1: know you stacking curiosity turn it into passion, all you're
Speaker 1: doing is really toning up the juice. But all this
Speaker 1: is besides the point that I wanted to make, which
Speaker 1: is when people think about passion, if I I say, give
Speaker 1: me an example of athletic passion or something like that,
Speaker 1: you talk to me about Lebron James Windmilling in for
Speaker 1: a dunk over some hapless defender in the finals and
Speaker 1: right in the fourth quarter is exhausted, there's sweat, dripping
Speaker 1: off them. That's athletic passion, and you're right, but it's
Speaker 1: late stage passion. Passion on the front end does not
Speaker 1: look or feel at all like passion on the back end,
Speaker 1: that kind of warrior passion that you're looking at saying
Speaker 1: I want that. That is a slow build over very
Speaker 1: long periods of time to get to there. Got to
Speaker 1: remember the passion on the front end for that windmill
Speaker 1: dunk is just a little kid in a driveway shooting
Speaker 1: a basketball through a hoop trying to get it to Faull.
Speaker 1: That's what it looks like on the front end. And
Speaker 1: so we mistake when we're at the front of our
Speaker 1: journey towards our passion. We mistake what we think we're
Speaker 1: not feeling on the inside for what we're looking at
Speaker 1: on the outside and saying it's going to feel like
Speaker 1: that looks and now it will never feel like that
Speaker 1: looks on the front end of it. It literally can't
Speaker 1: you and body passion on the back end. No, on
Speaker 1: the on the I don't think I'm trying to say, yeah,
Speaker 1: look at you. Now, I bring up some things and
Speaker 1: then you go, oh, that to me, that's passion, right,
Speaker 1: But you put in the work. That's the end stage.
Speaker 1: That's the end stage, you know in the beginning, I
Speaker 1: mean literally in neurobiologically, it does appear that passion is
Speaker 1: just nothing more than the intersection of multiple curiosities. And
Speaker 1: what you want to do is you find a thing
Speaker 1: you're curious about, find another thing you're curious about. Where
Speaker 1: do they intersect. I'm really interested in football, I'm really
Speaker 1: interested in food. Okay, great football is what are the
Speaker 1: traditional care requirements for football? Let's play around there for
Speaker 1: a while. That's the intersection, right, Maybe there's something there
Speaker 1: and you just play there for a little while. Where
Speaker 1: does that connect with something else you're passionate about? And
Speaker 1: the reason is simply that curiosity on its own is
Speaker 1: a powerful motivator, but it's not powerful enough. It won't
Speaker 1: endure over time enough. Right, if you can play at
Speaker 1: the intersection of multiple curiosities, two or three or four
Speaker 1: things that you really care about, and you put in
Speaker 1: the work to play the properly. When I say play,
Speaker 1: I literally mean play, like, go out, talk about it.
Speaker 1: You want those social bonding neurochemicals underneath it. There's a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of that stuff that are broken down in
Speaker 1: the book, But there's a very specific resume for a
Speaker 1: sort of cultivating passion, but you don't want to mystify it.
Speaker 1: Passion matters because it gives us focus for free. You
Speaker 1: can pay attention with less energy. That's why passion matters.
Speaker 1: Why does purpose matter? You get more focus or free
Speaker 1: than you do for passion, right, and you also purpose,
Speaker 1: which brings into cause better than yourself, gets the focus
Speaker 1: off yourself, which, as you know, if you're interested in flow,
Speaker 1: you can't have too much prefrontal cortex ego engagement going
Speaker 1: on to really drive a lot of flow that gets
Speaker 1: in the way. So purpose puts the It expands your focus.
Speaker 1: You go from an egocentric focus to like a task
Speaker 1: specific focus much more easily when it's purpose is involved.
Speaker 1: These are you know, really they sound like purpose sounds
Speaker 1: like this, I want to purpose and it sounds really selfless, right,
Speaker 1: You hear it a lot today. But from a peak
Speaker 1: performance perspective, it's totally selfish. Having a purpose is unbelievably selfish. Yes,
Speaker 1: it is great for the world to have a purpose,
Speaker 1: but from a peak performance perspective, you're getting so much
Speaker 1: focus for free, so many reward chemicals that drive productivity
Speaker 1: and performance for free. That's the That's sort of the
Speaker 1: point in a sense, which is you know you could
Speaker 1: it could be good for you and good for the
Speaker 1: world at the same time. That's okay too, synergy great.
Speaker 1: So I just want to conclude today's episode with a
Speaker 1: question for you, Stephen. What are the three things that
Speaker 1: people can do to be a high performer? Oh? I've
Speaker 1: been set up, all right, Scott. Well, here's my thing
Speaker 1: on that one. You have a Stephen has a bit
Speaker 1: of a b in his bond. I gotta be in
Speaker 1: my body. It's not so. It's that, you know when
Speaker 1: this happens a lot when I when I give a speech,
Speaker 1: somebody stands up afterwards, invariable like and they ask what
Speaker 1: are the three things I can do Monday morning? And
Speaker 1: I usually answer in should we say colorful language? I
Speaker 1: usually apologize before I use the colorful language, and then
Speaker 1: I use the colorful language and then explain why and
Speaker 1: the reason is this peak performance? It's not crazy right
Speaker 1: by the time you get to the the end of
Speaker 1: the art in bossible. If you look at it, peak
Speaker 1: performance is roughly about six things to do every day,
Speaker 1: seven things to do every week and they vary a
Speaker 1: little bit, and they're not very long things to do.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the things you might want to
Speaker 1: you need to regulate your nervous system on a daily basis.
Speaker 1: That means either mindfulness, gratitude, or exercise. Right, gratitude is
Speaker 1: a five minute gratitude practice. So that's not a big
Speaker 1: thing to do, That's what I mean. But it's every day, right,
Speaker 1: it's not. That's why there's no three things you can
Speaker 1: do Monday morning, because it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, repeat.
Speaker 1: Because the real benefits, the benefits we all want, if
Speaker 1: you're just patient with yourself and show up and just
Speaker 1: do the work. Don't worry about the outcomes. Your job
Speaker 1: is to do the work. Do a gratitude practice today,
Speaker 1: do a you know what I mean, like literally, do
Speaker 1: the work, don't care about the outcome. Just you do
Speaker 1: it every day, over and over and over again. Two
Speaker 1: three four months in these it's exponential growth. Right, So
Speaker 1: you get these doublings, and the early doublings are almost invisible.
Speaker 1: But suddenly you're like, oh my god, I'll give you
Speaker 1: a really simple Let mean, let me give you a
Speaker 1: slightly longer answer that makes this really clear. In the book,
Speaker 1: I talk about something called the habit of ferocity. This
Speaker 1: is potentially the ability to lean into challenges or or
Speaker 1: to lean into challenges instinctively and automatically. And it's what
Speaker 1: I see in peak performers. After they sort of properly
Speaker 1: cultivate all your intrinsic motivation, there's layer in some goal setting,
Speaker 1: some grit skills. You get. This just sort of happens,
Speaker 1: and I a woulds see it the habit of ferosty.
Speaker 1: What's the big deal? What does this matter? What is
Speaker 1: this habit of ferosty? Most people when they encounter a challenge,
Speaker 1: something that's hard or problem to solve whatever, even if
Speaker 1: it's something they have a work thing where they got
Speaker 1: to do it, they've got a bitch about it for
Speaker 1: five minutes. They're just going to be like, oh God,
Speaker 1: I don't want to do this, I'm gonna free blow.
Speaker 1: And it's only five minutes. But on any given work
Speaker 1: day or whatever, I encounter about five of those, right,
Speaker 1: And so if you've got the habit of ferocity and
Speaker 1: you're just leaning it automatically, the challenge rises up and
Speaker 1: you lean in sort of before you even think you
Speaker 1: have time to think about it. You're just in the
Speaker 1: problem solving it. Say five minutes problem, it's twenty five
Speaker 1: minutes a day. It's three and a half hours a week,
Speaker 1: three and a half weeks a year. That's what you
Speaker 1: get back. That's what I mean by compound interest. Like
Speaker 1: people look at people performers and they're like, they're so
Speaker 1: far ahead of me. How did they get so far ahead?
Speaker 1: They got so far ahead literally, like five minutes at
Speaker 1: a time. It's not some giant leap, it's not so miracle.
Speaker 1: It's literally they've lined up their intrinsic motivators, they've properly
Speaker 1: set their goals. They've just got a little more fire,
Speaker 1: little more internal neurochemistry through very very doable, easy processes,
Speaker 1: and as a result, when a challenge rises up, they
Speaker 1: just lean in to meet it and they don't dither around.
Speaker 1: And the results over a year is you're going to
Speaker 1: get a month of time back. That's considerable. And that's
Speaker 1: just one little thing, right, That's what I mean by
Speaker 1: compounding youst are you going to notice it in any
Speaker 1: given day? Oh, I say five minutes You know what
Speaker 1: I mean? You don't but you notice it when you're
Speaker 1: three weeks ahead. I hear you. The sociologist Daniel Chambliss
Speaker 1: wrote a really cool article, The Mundanity of Excellence, looking
Speaker 1: at Olympic sports people, and he said, it's really quite
Speaker 1: mundane when you follow their process over a long period
Speaker 1: of time. But of course it doesn't. That doesn't mean
Speaker 1: talent doesn't matter. Maybe it's necessary but not sufficient. You
Speaker 1: know my feeling. You and I think, sure, I think
Speaker 1: everybody's grated something. I really do. I mean, yes, I
Speaker 1: do matters, but I think everybody's great at something. I
Speaker 1: think it maybe hard could be great. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that's the correct phrase. So yeah, I mean talent is
Speaker 1: a thing. But you know, both you and I were
Speaker 1: guys who coming up, people thought we were way behind
Speaker 1: the curve, right. They didn't think we were out too.
Speaker 1: They thought we were behind the curve. I was. I
Speaker 1: wasn't in the same classes, but I wasn't in a
Speaker 1: special ed. But I had a sixth grade teacher who
Speaker 1: told me I wouldn't live to see thirty. I had,
Speaker 1: you know, I had a bunch of you know, get
Speaker 1: kicked out of school kind of stuff. So I had
Speaker 1: that stuff. We seemed to out. You know what I mean,
Speaker 1: like everyone he's great at something you figured out. Oh, Stephen,
Speaker 1: you give me chills, man, because I've been told many
Speaker 1: times a child that it would be impossible to go
Speaker 1: to even college. Right, talk about the art of impossible.
Speaker 1: I got a PhD from Yale, So clearly your theory
Speaker 1: and research and art and all this it means something
Speaker 1: and it can inspire a lot of people. So thanks
Speaker 1: Steven so much for being on the show today. I
Speaker 1: wish you all the best with the book tour. Thank you, Scott,
Speaker 1: It's been great hanging out with you. Appreciate it. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If
Speaker 1: you'd like to react in some way to something you heard,
Speaker 1: I encourage you to join in the discussion at the
Speaker 1: Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also,
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