Speaker 1: The internal experience of learning for everyone, everybody in the world.
Speaker 1: Is I suck. I suck, I suck, suck, I suck.
Speaker 1: Oh look, I don't suck anymore.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 2: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
Speaker 2: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
Speaker 2: think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
Speaker 2: thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 2: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 2: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 2: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 2: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 2: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 2: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 2: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. We
Speaker 2: hope you'll enjoy this episode from the archive. Thanks for
Speaker 2: joining us. Our guest on this episode is Stephen Kotler,
Speaker 2: a New York Times bestselling author, award winning journalist, and
Speaker 2: the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. Stephen is
Speaker 2: one of the world's leading experts on human performance. He's
Speaker 2: the author of thirteen books, nine of them best sellers,
Speaker 2: including the Art of Impossible, A Peak Performance Primer.
Speaker 3: Hi Steven, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Good to be with you, Eric.
Speaker 3: Your book is called The Art of Impossible, A Peak
Speaker 3: Performance Primer. And as I was telling you before the show,
Speaker 3: I have taken perhaps as many notes on this book
Speaker 3: as any I have read. So we've got a lot
Speaker 3: of different ways we could take this conversation. But before
Speaker 3: we get into it, we'll start like we always do
Speaker 3: with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with
Speaker 3: his grandson in life, and he says, there's two wolves
Speaker 3: inside of us that are always at battle. What is
Speaker 3: a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
Speaker 3: and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
Speaker 3: represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
Speaker 3: grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
Speaker 3: and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 3: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 3: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 3: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 3: 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: human 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, you get to the point
Speaker 1: where you put your eyes on the exit and you
Speaker 1: go there. We're goal directed machines on the internally, and
Speaker 1: what that essentially means is we don't live in reality.
Speaker 1: We live in a world that's shaped predominantly by our
Speaker 1: fears and our goals, and in a sense, on an
Speaker 1: internal level, with those goals, the way sort of consciousness
Speaker 1: of our biology is designed to work. Once again, you
Speaker 1: go 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 reput
Speaker 1: our attention.
Speaker 3: So I'm going to start us in an unusual place.
Speaker 3: It's near the end of your book. Can you describe
Speaker 3: having lime disease and you describe going out and starting
Speaker 3: to surf, and you just starting to have these mystical experiences.
Speaker 3: I'm wondering if you could share a little bit more
Speaker 3: about that, and I'm kind of curious whether they've still
Speaker 3: continued for you. And then I went to ground some
Speaker 3: of that back into what the science tells us, because
Speaker 3: you've done a great job of taking these mystical experiences
Speaker 3: and bringing them back to some of why we think
Speaker 3: 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 ten twenty thirty minutes a day, and
Speaker 1: everything else was just fuzzy and painful. And I was
Speaker 1: out there maybe thirty seconds in a wave came and
Speaker 1: I literally probably took all the energy I had left
Speaker 1: in the world, and I spun my board around and
Speaker 1: I popped to my feet. I popped into a dimension
Speaker 1: of time I didn't even know existed. Time seemed to
Speaker 1: slow down. I had a slid out of body experience
Speaker 1: where I felt like I was hovering about my body
Speaker 1: and sort of watching myself, but like I had panoramic vision.
Speaker 1: The most amazing part was that I was clearheaded, and
Speaker 1: I felt great, and I hadn't felt even close vaguely
Speaker 1: normal for three years, so it was astounding. And I
Speaker 1: felt so good that day, and that experience was so
Speaker 1: wild that I ended up catching four more waves. And
Speaker 1: then when that was over, I was done, and I
Speaker 1: was exhausted, and my friends took me home, put me
Speaker 1: in the bed, and I didn't move again for about
Speaker 1: fourteen days. Fifteenth day walking in, I caught a ride
Speaker 1: with my neighbor and I went back to the beach
Speaker 1: and I did it again. And the amazing thing is
Speaker 1: Over the course of about six eight months, I wasn't
Speaker 1: went from about ten percent functional, meaning like I was
Speaker 1: functional about ten percent of time, to about eighty percent functional.
Speaker 1: And the only thing that I was doing different in
Speaker 1: my life was going surfing and having these quasi mistical
Speaker 1: experiences in the waves. So I was obviously very very
Speaker 1: curious about what the hell was going on, because surfing
Speaker 1: is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions, and
Speaker 1: I'm a rational materialist, I'm a science guy. I don't
Speaker 1: have mystical experiences, and lime is only fatal if it
Speaker 1: gets into your brain. So I was pretty sure that
Speaker 1: the re Even though I was feeling better, the reason
Speaker 1: I was having these quasi mystical experiences is because the
Speaker 1: disease had gotten in my brain. And so I lit
Speaker 1: out a giant quest to figure out what the heck
Speaker 1: was going on. And I very quickly discovered that these
Speaker 1: quasi mystic experiences I have names. We call them flow states,
Speaker 1: and once you start to understand the neurobiology of flow
Speaker 1: what's going on in the brain, a lot of these
Speaker 1: so called mystical experiences that show up with this state
Speaker 1: are obviously very explainable. Be a biology. But the second
Speaker 1: half of this question was am I still having these
Speaker 1: experiences today? Am I still getting into flow today? Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm still getting into flow today.
Speaker 3: And so would you have described them as mystical then
Speaker 3: because you didn't know what else to call them and
Speaker 3: 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, what 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. GE'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 for you to enew's been in a car crash.
Speaker 3: So let's swing now all the way back around to
Speaker 3: kind of the beginning of the book. The book is
Speaker 3: called The Art of Impossible, and you describe two levels
Speaker 3: of impossible. There's impossible, as in like somebody being able
Speaker 3: to run the four minute mile, which was once thought
Speaker 3: of as impossible. So that's one type, but you describe
Speaker 3: another type of impossible that might apply to more of
Speaker 3: the people listening than trying to break a record that's
Speaker 3: 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. That's what I call capital
Speaker 1: I impossible, doing that which has never been done. And
Speaker 1: what you just mentioned is lowercase I incompossible. There's small
Speaker 1: I impossible, which is essentially who I wrote the book for.
Speaker 1: Right lessons learned from those people who have accomplished capital impossible.
Speaker 1: It is for anybody who's going after lowercase I impossible,
Speaker 1: lowercase 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 mill town and I wanted
Speaker 1: to be a writer. I mean I wanted to be
Speaker 1: a writer from that 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 nowhere unn 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
Speaker 1: are more familiar with getting paid for what you love
Speaker 1: to do, overcoming trauma, overcoming an addiction, becoming world class
Speaker 1: at anything to do, becoming a successful entrepreneur or artist.
Speaker 1: A missing one, obvious one that's eluding me that I
Speaker 1: like to.
Speaker 3: Grab for, but I think it paints 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, redman against us. That's all that peahuman performance is.
Speaker 1: And what this means is if your goal is capitaliz possible,
Speaker 1: that which has never been done, well, that's the biology
Speaker 1: you're going to draw. That's how you're going to do it.
Speaker 1: If your goal is small eye impossible, well the biology
Speaker 1: is the same, the tools are the same. In fact,
Speaker 1: if your goal is man, small eye impossible, caw fuck that.
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to get through Monday, right, Like, it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter. The biology is the same, the set of
Speaker 1: tools are the same because evolutions shaped human beings and
Speaker 1: the work that I do involve figuring out how to
Speaker 1: optimize that biology and its scales. Meaning it's the same
Speaker 1: in everyone or At the Flow Research Collective, we train
Speaker 1: on average about a thousand people a month, and we
Speaker 1: train everybody from kind of members in the US Special
Speaker 1: Forces and professional athletes and c suite executive CEOs of
Speaker 1: major companies all the way to like soccer moms from
Speaker 1: Ohio and insurance workers from Indiana and you know, software
Speaker 1: coders from Bangalore.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Because the work that I do is built on biology,
Speaker 1: principles apply to everybody and and we can use them.
Speaker 3: In the book, you talk about biology scaling, but personality doesn't.
Speaker 3: And so the principles that we're going to spend a
Speaker 3: little bit of time talking about and as I mentioned
Speaker 3: from the number of notes I took, we're going to
Speaker 3: skim the very slightest surface of But the principles that
Speaker 3: we're about to cover, you're saying are happening at the
Speaker 3: 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 in your four foot nine. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is not what we're.
Speaker 3: Talking about, right, Like, you need a different book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you need a different book. I can't help you
Speaker 1: with the genetics part at all, Like that's a different thing.
Speaker 1: But barring that, yes, biology scales. My work is centered
Speaker 1: on the state of performance known as flow. Right, we
Speaker 1: talked about flow as what I was experiencing out in
Speaker 1: the waves. It is I alluded to is defined as
Speaker 1: an optimal state of consciousness. We refeel our best and
Speaker 1: we perform our best. More specifically, it's any of those
Speaker 1: moments of rapt attention and total absorption. You get so
Speaker 1: focused on what you're doing that everything else just disappears.
Speaker 1: Right time, dialights, as we talked about your sense of
Speaker 1: self disappears, actual awareness will start to merge, and all
Speaker 1: aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof.
Speaker 1: We could talk about how what through the roof actually
Speaker 1: means huge boosts in motivation, grit, productivity, creativity, learning, empathy, perspectives,
Speaker 1: a little bit of strength, stamina, fast, chuss, a couple
Speaker 1: other things. We talk about where the why later, But
Speaker 1: the point I want to make is those are basically
Speaker 1: all the things you want to accelerate for cognitive It's
Speaker 1: the whole suite, it's all our tools, they're all amplified
Speaker 1: and flow. And here's the kicker. Everybody's hardwired for floor flow.
Speaker 1: It's a foundational part of being human. Evolution shaped every
Speaker 1: human being to perform at their best in float. Flow
Speaker 1: is how we do. How we're hardwired for pre performance.
Speaker 1: There are other things going on during pre performance and
Speaker 1: other things that lead to it, but flow is at
Speaker 1: the center of it. And one of the most well
Speaker 1: established facts in flow science is that the state is universal,
Speaker 1: shows up in anyone anywhere provided certain initial conditions are
Speaker 1: that so everybody watching us, listening to this can get
Speaker 1: into flow and you can get this same boost and performance.
Speaker 1: So for starters, that's one thing that we're talking about.
Speaker 1: When you say biology.
Speaker 3: Scales excellent, and you've written about flow elsewhere, it's been
Speaker 3: part of your writing for a while now, and so
Speaker 3: you say that this book expands upon that. Right, It
Speaker 3: certainly talks about we need flow, but we also have
Speaker 3: to train up some of the other skills like motivation, learning,
Speaker 3: and creativity. So a lot of the book is really
Speaker 3: talking about how we increase our motivation, how we increase
Speaker 3: our learning, and how we increase our creativity. So talk
Speaker 3: about how flow ties together with those three things.
Speaker 1: So, as I said, peak performance is getting our biology
Speaker 1: to work for us rather than against us. What is
Speaker 1: that biology? 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 1: Learning is what allows you to continue to play, especially
Speaker 1: if you're going after like high hard goals that are
Speaker 1: complicated you don't quite not get there. Creativity is how
Speaker 1: you steer right, Creative problem solvings how you steer, and
Speaker 1: flow is how you sort of turbo boost, all those
Speaker 1: things sort of beyond reason with expectations. But you asked
Speaker 1: a sort of different question, which is sort of where
Speaker 1: I got stuck thinking about, like which way to frame this?
Speaker 1: How they relate is interesting. So, as you pointed out,
Speaker 1: I've been doing this a long time. I've been training
Speaker 1: people in flow for years and years and years. I
Speaker 1: think I've probably spoken to or trained order million people.
Speaker 1: Is I guess my staff has come up with. I
Speaker 1: don't know if it's right or not, but somewhere around
Speaker 1: there it's a lot of people. And what we've learned
Speaker 1: about flow over the past ten to fifteen years is
Speaker 1: more about the neurobiology of 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 say that at the Flow Research Collective
Speaker 1: we train about one 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. But butt and button is
Speaker 1: how everything is related. What we used to see is
Speaker 1: you get this big burst and flow because it turns
Speaker 1: out this is easy to train, and then there'd be
Speaker 1: this spectacular return to baseline, like they'd get a ton
Speaker 1: of flow, and then it would just like it's somebody
Speaker 1: turned off the flow tap and flow is one of
Speaker 1: the most pleasurable, addictive, meaningful, life affirming experiences we can
Speaker 1: possibly have. And you give people a whole lot more
Speaker 1: of that and then you take it away or it
Speaker 1: stops showing up. You have very pissed off people, and
Speaker 1: we had very pissed off people, and so it's been
Speaker 1: a really long time trying to figure out what the
Speaker 1: hell's going wrong, what is And what we realized is
Speaker 1: problem wasn't flow. It was that all the stuff that
Speaker 1: flow amplifies, but specifically motivation, learning and creativity, if you
Speaker 1: hadn't trained those things up at alongside flow, you couldn't
Speaker 1: keep pace with the acceleration that the state provided. And worse,
Speaker 1: when psychologists and researchers talking about motivation, the term is
Speaker 1: technically defined as the energy for action. But what they
Speaker 1: really mean as a whole bunch of stuff. Motivation is
Speaker 1: 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 flows,
Speaker 1: this enormously pleasurable experience, but it doesn't last forever. And
Speaker 1: if you haven't done the good selling gritwork, there are
Speaker 1: going to be days where there's no flow, right, and
Speaker 1: it's just hard work, hardslogging, And if you haven't done
Speaker 1: the work to develop really good grit skills, those days
Speaker 1: are going to be very, very difficult. They get a
Speaker 1: little easier because of flow, and we know that flow
Speaker 1: massively amplifies grit. But some people have this problem when
Speaker 1: they do this flow work, where they start to feel
Speaker 1: that it's a bliss junkie problem. Flow is so addictively pleasurable, right,
Speaker 1: They're like, oh, dude, everything's got to feel this good.
Speaker 1: 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 flow,
Speaker 1: or you haven't done the really hardcore grit work, you
Speaker 1: can't sustain in the flow. It's not simple, but important.
Speaker 3: I think, yep, absolutely, that really covered it. And I
Speaker 3: think you make that point a bunch of times, and
Speaker 3: I think it's an important one that on our way
Speaker 3: to impossible, flow is an absolute booster, necessary but not sufficient, yep.
Speaker 3: And that it feels really good. But along the way
Speaker 3: to impossible there's going to be a lot of feeling
Speaker 3: not very good also. And if all we're thinking about
Speaker 3: is oh, like you said, I should be feeling flow,
Speaker 3: I should be feeling good. This should always be wonderful,
Speaker 3: we won't have what it takes to keep going all
Speaker 3: 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 happiness. How
Speaker 1: do you feel right here, right now? There's not a
Speaker 1: whole lot you can do about that level, right you
Speaker 1: can make yourselves. Dee Anne Harris said ten percent happier.
Speaker 1: Gratitude practice is mindfulness, practice is 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 a BYuT ten eleven
Speaker 1: years old. And this is the worst we're going to
Speaker 1: feel and is the best we're going to feel in
Speaker 1: our lives going to take place pretty much in the middle,
Speaker 1: and barring chronic unemployment or the death of a child.
Speaker 1: On the low end, that's the low end, it doesn't move.
Speaker 1: It's pretty set. High end can move with constant exposures
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 lifestyle in which you
Speaker 1: get regular access to flow. This could be it 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 purpose,
Speaker 1: deep peace. Even but happiness, I mean, it's just a
Speaker 1: thin drug. Ultimately, That's I think what you start to
Speaker 1: discover overview 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 out there.
Speaker 3: Right right, and often aiming right at happiness as that
Speaker 3: being the goal is particularly counterproductive.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's a good way to miss it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a good way to miss it.
Speaker 3: So what I'm going to do from here is we're
Speaker 3: just going to skip through a few different parts of
Speaker 3: the book and hit some different things that bring together
Speaker 3: some of these different components of motivation, learning, and curiosity.
Speaker 3: So I want to talk about motivation for a minute,
Speaker 3: because you talk about there being a stack that's really
Speaker 3: important in the drug live. Part of motivation, which we
Speaker 3: would think of is the way most people typically think
Speaker 3: of motivation as I feel like doing something right, I
Speaker 3: have the energy to want to do something. And you
Speaker 3: mentioned that there are really five things that make up
Speaker 3: this drive stack. You talk about curiosity, passion, purpose, and
Speaker 3: then autonomy and mastery. After those, I'm wondering if we
Speaker 3: could talk a little bit about curiosity, because the way
Speaker 3: that you laid out for people to find some of
Speaker 3: their curiosity I really loved. I really liked some of
Speaker 3: the exercises that were there and so I was wondering
Speaker 3: if you could walk us through briefly the basic exercise
Speaker 3: and how somebody can start to find maybe what their
Speaker 3: curiosity is. I hear this up from a lot of people.
Speaker 3: I don't quite know what it is. How you cultivate
Speaker 3: a passion by sort of going through the gate of curiosity,
Speaker 3: 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: met and curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, master but those tend
Speaker 1: in the science to be the biggest five. Right. You
Speaker 1: could 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
Speaker 1: internal 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 hydrate super well. They're going to
Speaker 1: make sure they have enough protein and carbs and fats
Speaker 1: and blah blah blah right and the right nutrition and
Speaker 1: the right supplements and the right everything. You also want
Speaker 1: to stack internal fuel sources. It's hard to do anything
Speaker 1: in this world, and it's hard to go after anything
Speaker 1: high hard goals. You need as many of internal fuel
Speaker 1: sources as you possibly can get. In other words, you
Speaker 1: want all your intrinsic motivators, your big five, aligned in
Speaker 1: point in the same direction, and they're actually built that way.
Speaker 1: They're built to come online in a certain order and
Speaker 1: to point us in direction. And as you pointed out,
Speaker 1: the most foundational human motivators curiosity. So, by the way,
Speaker 1: what's the big deal about intrinsic motivators? Like, why do
Speaker 1: we even care? Why are we having this conversation? Interest
Speaker 1: motivators give us focus for free. That's the really big deal.
Speaker 1: Your brain takes about twenty five percent of your energy
Speaker 1: at rest, and it gets two percent of your body weight.
Speaker 1: It's a giant energy hog, right, and focus is a huge, huge,
Speaker 1: huge caloric energy expense. You're curious about it. You're paying
Speaker 1: attention without working too hard or at all. That's great. Now, Curiosity,
Speaker 1: as you alluded to, is designed biologically to be built
Speaker 1: into passion. When people say passion, what that looks like
Speaker 1: biologically is often just the intersection of multiple curiosities. The
Speaker 1: way to think about this is like, maybe you're interested
Speaker 1: in football and you're interested in nutrition. 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 you.
Speaker 1: 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. It's free. We just put it online
Speaker 1: for people the Passion recipe dot com. It teaches you
Speaker 1: how to cultivate and turn curiosity into passion and turn
Speaker 1: passion into purpose. So if you want to cultivate curiosity,
Speaker 1: you really just want to start with twenty five things
Speaker 1: you're interested in it. And all I mean by interested
Speaker 1: it is, say you're a free weekend. You would maybe
Speaker 1: want to spend it watching a couple movies about the subject,
Speaker 1: or reading a book, or having a conversation or two
Speaker 1: with an expert. Right, that's what I mean interested. Make
Speaker 1: a list of twenty five things you're interested in. The
Speaker 1: key here is try to be as specific as possible, right,
Speaker 1: don't be interested in football. Be interested in the past
Speaker 1: blocking mechanics required to play left tackle as precise as
Speaker 1: you possibly can be. Right.
Speaker 3: I loved your punk rock analogy. You got to give
Speaker 3: the if you remember. Oh yeah, don't be interested in
Speaker 3: punk rock, right.
Speaker 1: Don't be interested in punk rock. Be interested. I think
Speaker 1: it was the evolution of political punk from Crass to
Speaker 1: Rise Against And 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 man. I guess, but which is true?
Speaker 3: 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 3: Yeah, they're live record that they put out.
Speaker 1: Oh I love it.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you've it.
Speaker 1: It's so good. The live version of the lyric is condoliez.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what the hell?
Speaker 1: From her Lips to God's Ears. I think that's the
Speaker 1: name of the song From Her Lips to God's Ears.
Speaker 1: The live version of that is really good, and Potatoes,
Speaker 1: Rice and Beans live is really good on that album
Speaker 1: as well.
Speaker 3: They're an amazing live band. So we've derailed ourselves.
Speaker 1: Now back to punk is something got Now you got
Speaker 1: my attention.
Speaker 3: Maybe we'll see if we lead back around to it.
Speaker 3: So we're making a list of twenty five things.
Speaker 1: Twenty five things you're interested in, and then you just
Speaker 1: 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 big.
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 1: that's how we build passion. A couple things that are
Speaker 1: worth pointing out, though, because people have this problem when
Speaker 1: they start cultivating passion, is they think about passion. I say,
Speaker 1: you know, give me an example of athletic passion. You
Speaker 1: get like Lebron James coming in for the and dunk,
Speaker 1: you know, with a skowl on his face and the finals. Right,
Speaker 1: And yes, you are right, that is passion. But that
Speaker 1: is a late stage passion. That is not what early
Speaker 1: stage passion looks like or feels like. Early stage passion
Speaker 1: is just a little kid standing in a driveway trying
Speaker 1: to get a basketball to drop. And it feels like
Speaker 1: that on the inside, right, It feels more like curiosity
Speaker 1: and little successes than like this burning, consuming thing that
Speaker 1: you think you expect to this like giant burning fire
Speaker 1: all at once. It's not going to be there. And
Speaker 1: the other thing is you don't want it there right away.
Speaker 1: What you want to do is slowly cultivate your passion
Speaker 1: and make sure you've got it right, because you don't
Speaker 1: want to be a couple of years into this is
Speaker 1: my passion to discover Oh shit, it was only a phase, right.
Speaker 1: I don't actually want to spend the next two years
Speaker 1: on an archaeological dig in the deserts of Egypt because no,
Speaker 1: it turns out it was a phase. Right, Like when
Speaker 1: you come to that point, if you screw it up,
Speaker 1: it's really demotivating. So on the front end, you want
Speaker 1: to go slowly here. This is not one of those
Speaker 1: things in peak performance. Everybody can do this. Everybody can
Speaker 1: figure out align their curiosities, build them into passion, build
Speaker 1: 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 when this is
Speaker 1: one of those places where you've got to go slow
Speaker 1: to go fast.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love you saying the book. You know, we
Speaker 3: often think of, like you said, passion, get obsessed, stay obsessed,
Speaker 3: and you say, you know, let's start with get curious,
Speaker 3: stay curious. All right, I'm going to jump right out
Speaker 3: of that section, even though we could go from there
Speaker 3: into how to turn that passion into a purpose and
Speaker 3: you know, autonomy and mastery in that area. But I
Speaker 3: want to move into a little bit about grit, and
Speaker 3: I want to talk about the idea of learning to
Speaker 3: work with our thoughts as part of grit.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, that's really key. So place to start, I
Speaker 1: guess is that when psychologists define grit, they often define
Speaker 1: it using Angela Duckworth's definition as the intersection of passion
Speaker 1: and perseverance. And I love Angela's work. She's an exceptionally
Speaker 1: bright woman. She's done exceptionally great research. But when you
Speaker 1: talk to pig performers about grit, they actually say, hey,
Speaker 1: wait a minute. They train six different kinds of grit skills,
Speaker 1: and it all sort of require different techniques and in
Speaker 1: the end they sort of all will boil down to
Speaker 1: the same thing, but you have to train them independently
Speaker 1: for a while. The first is the perseverance, the grit
Speaker 1: we're all familiar with, right, kick me in the teeth,
Speaker 1: punche me that God doesn't matter. I'm still coming. And
Speaker 1: that's the that's the first level of grit. As often
Speaker 1: and by the way, it's if you want to train
Speaker 1: that level of grit, that level of perseverance, you want
Speaker 1: to start physically. The research says, even if you want
Speaker 1: to train it cognitively, which is the question that you
Speaker 1: asked about, and we're going to get there, the place
Speaker 1: to start is physically and by perseverance. If you work out,
Speaker 1: you go to the gym and you normally do three
Speaker 1: sets of ten when you bench press, next time, do
Speaker 1: two sets of ten and one set of eleven, very
Speaker 1: very slowly. You just want to push outside your comfort
Speaker 1: zone a little bit at a time, over and over
Speaker 1: and over again. And here's the key, especially on perseverance side,
Speaker 1: because this is this is tricky and people miss this
Speaker 1: a lot. It's not enough to put in the hard
Speaker 1: work to get grittier. You have to notice. So you
Speaker 1: have to in other words, you got to Yes, you
Speaker 1: got to show up and do that next eleventh eleventh rep.
Speaker 1: You know, every time you work out, just for the
Speaker 1: next month, but you also got to remember at the
Speaker 1: end of the month to look back and go, wow,
Speaker 1: the entire time every time I had to do that
Speaker 1: eleventh breath, I got it. I'm tough enough to do that.
Speaker 1: You've got to remember to notice that you're developing grit
Speaker 1: along the way, which is really important because you have
Speaker 1: to trust that grit for it to really make a
Speaker 1: difference in your life. You need to be able to
Speaker 1: know 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 won't 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 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 breath work meditation.
Speaker 1: These are two really really great methods. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of other stuff you can do. If you're more kind
Speaker 1: of kinesthetically oriented like me, you may prefer yoga to
Speaker 1: just straight up meditation because there's some movement involved. But
Speaker 1: there's a lot of different ways to sort of get
Speaker 1: some space between kind of thought and emotion. There's a
Speaker 1: gap between thought and emotion. What you want to try
Speaker 1: to do is like stretch it out so that when
Speaker 1: the thought pops up, before you get super angry and
Speaker 1: totally lose your temper at your wife or spouse or
Speaker 1: husband or whomever, you have a second to get in
Speaker 1: there and be like, whohoa, whoa right? Really sure this
Speaker 1: is the reaction you want?
Speaker 2: We could all use the occasional nudge, a little wake
Speaker 2: up from the autopilot we fall into in our day
Speaker 2: to day routine. That's why we send brief text reminders
Speaker 2: to listeners of the show for free. The texts help
Speaker 2: you stay on track with what you're learning from the
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Speaker 2: week's podcast topics in a bite sized, short and simple manner.
Speaker 2: We've heard from listeners that these texts help them take
Speaker 2: a moment to reconnect with what's important amidst the busyness
Speaker 2: of daily life. Someone said it feels like a little
Speaker 2: bit of wisdom is being whispered into my psyche, which
Speaker 2: I thought was cool. So, if you'd like to hear
Speaker 2: from us a few times a week via text, go
Speaker 2: to one ufeed dot net slash text and sign up
Speaker 2: for free.
Speaker 3: You bring up a couple of different things here. One
Speaker 3: is this idea of using the phrase control in our thoughts,
Speaker 3: which you then later sort of say, well, that's a
Speaker 3: little bit of a misnomer, right. Any of us who
Speaker 3: have sat down to meditate know the initial sort of
Speaker 3: launch of a thought into our brain is not really
Speaker 3: a controllable phenomenon. What comes up is what comes up.
Speaker 3: It's really what we do after that. And I love
Speaker 3: that you talk about the self talk. You say self
Speaker 3: talk's really important.
Speaker 2: Here.
Speaker 3: There's a quote in here from Michael Gervais that I
Speaker 3: absolutely love, and listeners who have heard me talk about
Speaker 3: this a lot. And he says that there's only two
Speaker 3: kinds of thoughts, those that constrict us or those that
Speaker 3: expand us. And I think that is such a powerful idea.
Speaker 3: You know, even when decision making, is this decision going
Speaker 3: to make me bigger or smaller? Is it going to
Speaker 3: expand me or contract me? That core idea is so powerful.
Speaker 1: I think so too. Well. What I like about it
Speaker 1: is for me. When Mike first said it to me,
Speaker 1: I thought about, well, I know what thoughts that create
Speaker 1: more space feel like internally, right, and so that I
Speaker 1: was like, Oh, this is totally applicable because I know
Speaker 1: what this feels like, so I can steer from this
Speaker 1: right off the bat. 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 3: 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 turn for one hundred feet. You just
Speaker 1: like you pin between two rock walls and you just
Speaker 1: have to hold keep it together until you get to
Speaker 1: the exit or you'll die. And it's terrifying. And I
Speaker 1: got into the straight line and my right ski hit
Speaker 1: a bunch of ice icicles actually that were fallen off
Speaker 1: the trees and into the run and it was like
Speaker 1: my race ski was bouncing on marbles. And the guy
Speaker 1: with schema said later it looked like I started to
Speaker 1: tip forward and like I was going to somersault, which
Speaker 1: 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: this is like my brain found another gear, which I
Speaker 1: appropriately referred to as fuck this. I'm not dying now, right,
Speaker 1: but I like, I got incredibly angry in the moment,
Speaker 1: like in rage, and I get 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 ongoing to the
Speaker 1: hospital now. And I was like, I'm not, like no,
Speaker 1: and I got super angry, and what was interesting. And
Speaker 1: this is why I'm bringing this up is we were
Speaker 1: talking about that experience in the context of Mike's quote,
Speaker 1: because you would not expec act like anger to be
Speaker 1: a thought that creates space. But in this particular case,
Speaker 1: this particular context, it was the only tool, right. If
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have grabbed for something that would have given
Speaker 1: me a lot of testosterone and adrenaline at that moment,
Speaker 1: I had to fight against gravity, right like icicles stripped
Speaker 1: me forward, which is really interesting. And we were talking
Speaker 1: about how sometimes thoughts that create space are not going
Speaker 1: to be the obvious ones sometimes. That was what the
Speaker 1: conversation was, and I thought, I thought it was an interesting,
Speaker 1: subtle point in one I hadn't thought about before.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great story. We're nearing the end of
Speaker 3: our time. But let's hopscotch ahead in the book here,
Speaker 3: and I want to talk about another part that I
Speaker 3: 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 anything.
Speaker 3: Before you have a public opinion on it, five not
Speaker 3: so easy steps to learn anything, Yes, five not so
Speaker 3: easy steps. Yes, I better add that to my outline
Speaker 3: and you sort of talk about the Other part of
Speaker 3: it that I loved is you're like, before I'm going
Speaker 3: to have a public opinion about something, I'm going to
Speaker 3: have gone through those And I remember thinking, boy, that
Speaker 3: would be refreshing for the world for more people to think, Well,
Speaker 3: before I'm going to have an opinion on that, I'm
Speaker 3: going to go through these five steps. It was really practical,
Speaker 3: and it really sort of dovetailed in some ways with
Speaker 3: my experience of learning things. And there were some subtleties
Speaker 3: that I had not thought of before that I think
Speaker 3: will help me in the future. So let's just kind
Speaker 3: 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 sweezy 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? 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? Why? Because we want to know that. We
Speaker 1: want to know how to create our future. Right, we
Speaker 1: want to know if this causes this, I know how
Speaker 1: to get that, I know how to intervene. I know
Speaker 1: how it works. That's what a narrative is. That's what
Speaker 1: a story is. This happened first, This happens, This happened third. Right,
Speaker 1: So when you're reading, one of the first things we
Speaker 1: want to pay attention to a little bit is history,
Speaker 1: the history of a subject. First of all, stop being
Speaker 1: intimidated by subjects. Just realize that any intellectual subject, whatever
Speaker 1: it is, it's just a voyage of discovery. Somebody had
Speaker 1: a question, they answered that question. It led to another question,
Speaker 1: and somebody had another question and they answered that one
Speaker 1: of them. Right, that's the voyage of discovery. That is
Speaker 1: any subject, and it's a narrative, And so just pay
Speaker 1: a little bit of attention to the order. The narrative
Speaker 1: is the big Christmas tree. If you give your brain
Speaker 1: the big Christmas tree, when the individual facts show up ornaments,
Speaker 1: you'll have an easier time remembering them because your brain
Speaker 1: is going to be like, oh, this happened. I put
Speaker 1: this fact right there. It slots in. This is something
Speaker 1: your brain naturally does, so you're just taking advantage of
Speaker 1: kind of your own basic software there. The second thing
Speaker 1: you want to pay attention to is terminology jargon. And
Speaker 1: what I mean by that is and I will be
Speaker 1: the first person to like, I have a flat rule
Speaker 1: in my company and by my life. If somebody needs
Speaker 1: a lot of big words to explain it, probably lying
Speaker 1: something I learned as a journalist. Right, For years and
Speaker 1: years and years, I've met the smartest people on the planet,
Speaker 1: and most of them can explain their thing to you
Speaker 1: as if you were five years old. It's always the
Speaker 1: folks who don't quite know what they're talking about that
Speaker 1: make it really fancy. In my opinion, that said jargon,
Speaker 1: while super annoying, tends to be annoyingly precise, and technical
Speaker 1: language often contains most of a subject. So when people
Speaker 1: talk about I need to learn a new subject, a
Speaker 1: large chunk of what they're actually saying is you need
Speaker 1: to learn vocabulary. So the way I do it is,
Speaker 1: when I'm reading one of these books, if I'm getting
Speaker 1: fancy language showed up that I don't understand. First time
Speaker 1: I see the word, I ignored. The second time I
Speaker 1: see the word I ignored. If I see a technical
Speaker 1: word that's three, three or four times in the book,
Speaker 1: I look it up, and then every time I see
Speaker 1: it from that point on, I just say the definitional
Speaker 1: out loud right instead of reading the word. I read
Speaker 1: the definition until it starts to stick. And the reason
Speaker 1: is 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 writt 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 dopeman and
Speaker 1: a little bit of aura up an 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.
Speaker 3: 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: blah 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. Okay, so
Speaker 1: caveat there. But this will really really help because by
Speaker 1: following our curiosity, we're following our natural learning software. That's
Speaker 1: how I do it. The other thing that I always
Speaker 1: point out to people because people make this mistake. I
Speaker 1: don't know if it's that we were taught this in
Speaker 1: school or we just assume this because it seems like
Speaker 1: common sense don't always need to understand everything. Learning means
Speaker 1: being uncertainly internal experience of learning for everyone everybody in
Speaker 1: the world is I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck,
Speaker 1: I suck. Oh look I don't suck anymore, right, that's
Speaker 1: the experience of it. In fact, my buddy Andrew Youubman
Speaker 1: is a Stanford neuroscientist, we do a lot of work
Speaker 1: with He says, you know, he does a lot of
Speaker 1: work with the Navy Seals, and he says, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things that peak performers, especially a speck
Speaker 1: ops guys know that everybody else doesn't, is that peak
Speaker 1: performance it's always crawl, walk, run, And the biggest difference
Speaker 1: is between pea performers and everybody else is that. Peak
Speaker 1: performers know this, and everybody else show up and they're like, dude, man,
Speaker 1: I don't crawl, I don't even walk. I'm going to
Speaker 1: figure out what the shortcut is. I'm going to start
Speaker 1: by a jog, right, And peak performers show up and
Speaker 1: they're like, you know what, Okay, I got a crawl,
Speaker 1: then I'm gonna walk and then maybe I'll run it.
Speaker 1: And it's gonna suck. I suck, I suck, I suck,
Speaker 1: I suck, and there's nothing to do but to do it.
Speaker 1: And it's funny because you see these top performers and
Speaker 1: we often think, oh my god, there's so far ahead
Speaker 1: of the rest of us. 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. They just lean
Speaker 1: right in the rest of us when face for the challenge,
Speaker 1: we dither around for a while. We're eventually going to
Speaker 1: rise to the challenge and do the thing. You've got
Speaker 1: to get it done, sooner or later, you got to.
Speaker 1: But most of us are like, oh, really, let me
Speaker 1: call my brother and tell them about all the shit.
Speaker 1: I got it. You know, we do all that, but
Speaker 1: peak performers just like, nope, crawl walk round. I'm just
Speaker 1: going to lean in immediately.
Speaker 3: I loved that whole section, and I think what you
Speaker 3: just said there is a great place for us to
Speaker 3: wrap up the conversation, which is really that idea of crawl,
Speaker 3: walk run. I talk about it all the time on
Speaker 3: the show. We just talk about this idea of you know,
Speaker 3: sometimes we've got to be willing to take baby steps.
Speaker 3: We've got to start where we are and move through
Speaker 3: the progression.
Speaker 1: I got to tell you something. I think it's all
Speaker 1: baby steps, but you've just got to be willing to
Speaker 1: continue to take baby steps. One of the things I
Speaker 1: tell people this isn't one hundred percent Drew, but as
Speaker 1: a general rule, because of emotional set points, if you've
Speaker 1: sort of survived being a teenager, you've already felt just
Speaker 1: about the worst that life can offer you. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying you can't have that bad feeling for days and
Speaker 1: days and weeks and months on ends, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. But emotional set points are sort of set
Speaker 1: up by around you know, ten or eleven or twelve,
Speaker 1: by like bad experiences good experiences, and most of life
Speaker 1: takes place in between, and then you get teenagers where
Speaker 1: your hormones are raging and you have no control of
Speaker 1: your emotions. So honestly, again, as I said earlier, unless
Speaker 1: there's the death of a child, the chronic unemployment, which
Speaker 1: can change this as a general rule, if you've survived
Speaker 1: being a teenager, you've suffered the worst that you're going
Speaker 1: to suffer on any peak performance path, taking those baby steps,
Speaker 1: which is a strange thing to realize, but it seems
Speaker 1: to be biologically true.
Speaker 3: Awesome, well, Stephen, thank you so much. I found the
Speaker 3: book absolutely fascinating. As I said, I took so many notes,
Speaker 3: my curiosity points of things that jumped off the page,
Speaker 3: because that's the way I prepare for these interviews what
Speaker 3: excites me. There were a ton of them.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you, I appreciate that.
Speaker 3: Thanks so much for taking the time to come on
Speaker 3: the show.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it. Well, my pleasure. Thank you.
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