Speaker 1: Before we get started, I wanted to give a big
Speaker 1: shout out to our newest Patreon members Adelsie, Jeremy c
Speaker 1: Elaine c Helen, Jane H, Ashley m pie Up, he
Speaker 1: Leon l E, cor Marie D and Jeremy H. Thanks
Speaker 1: so much to all of you, and thanks so much
Speaker 1: to all of our Patreon members. If you'd like to
Speaker 1: experience being a Patreon member and all the benefits that
Speaker 1: come with it, go to One you Feed dot net
Speaker 1: slash Join. Many of you might have heard me tell
Speaker 1: this story before last year when I went to New
Speaker 1: Mexico to interview Father Richard Rore. In his office, there
Speaker 1: was a quote posted that struck me and has stayed
Speaker 1: with me ever since. Life doesn't have to be perfect
Speaker 1: to be wonderful. But the good news is there is
Speaker 1: so much that is in our control, and some of
Speaker 1: those things are among the biggest influencers of our sense
Speaker 1: of well being. In the One you Feed Personal Transformation Program,
Speaker 1: I work one on one with people to build healthy
Speaker 1: habits and achieve their goals through applied behavior science. For example,
Speaker 1: when my client Janine started working with me, her focus
Speaker 1: was on regaining some balance in her life personally, I'm
Speaker 1: looking for overall balance in my life, which I have
Speaker 1: been for a really long time. If I was trying
Speaker 1: to implement a new habit or break an old habit,
Speaker 1: you just try to do too much at once, and
Speaker 1: I think taking on too much at once is difficult
Speaker 1: to make it stick. Janine is certainly not alone. One
Speaker 1: of the biggest mistakes people make when trying to change
Speaker 1: things in their lives is to try and do too
Speaker 1: much at once. There's a real formula for meaningful, sustained change,
Speaker 1: and that's what I worked with Janine to implement in
Speaker 1: her life. My overall experience with Eric has been phenomenal.
Speaker 1: Eric has a way of helping a person come to
Speaker 1: their own solutions, helping you dig deep. I would highly
Speaker 1: recommend Eric's program, and I would highly recommend anything it
Speaker 1: comes out within the future. If you're tired of waiting
Speaker 1: for the right circumstances to make progress towards your goals, I,
Speaker 1: as a behavior coach, can help you to book a free,
Speaker 1: no pressure, thirty minute call with me to see if
Speaker 1: the program is right for you. Go to Eric Zimmer
Speaker 1: dot coach slash application. My coaching spots fill up fast,
Speaker 1: so if you're interested, don't wait to look into the
Speaker 1: program to see if it's right for you. Go to
Speaker 1: Eric Zimmer dot coach slash application The internal experience of
Speaker 1: learning for everyone everybody in the world is I suck.
Speaker 1: I suck, I suck, I suck I suck. Oh look,
Speaker 1: I don't suck anymore. Welcome to the one you feed
Speaker 1: Throughout time, great tinkers have recognized the importance of the
Speaker 1: thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
Speaker 1: you are what you think ring true. And yet for
Speaker 1: many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jellisa, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
Speaker 1: episode is Stephen Cotler, a New York Times bestselling author,
Speaker 1: award winning journalist, and the executive director of The Flow
Speaker 1: Research Collective. Stephen is one of the world's leading experts
Speaker 1: on human performance. He's the author of thirteen books, nine
Speaker 1: of them best sellers, including the Art of Impossible, A
Speaker 1: Peak Performance Primer. I even welcome to the show. Good
Speaker 1: to be with you, Eric. Your book is called The
Speaker 1: Art of Impossible, A Peak Performance Primer. And as I
Speaker 1: was telling you before the show, I have taken perhaps
Speaker 1: as many notes on this book as any I have read.
Speaker 1: So we've got a lot of different ways we could
Speaker 1: take this conversation. But before we get into it, will
Speaker 1: start like we always do with the parable. There's a
Speaker 1: grandfather who's talking with his grandson in life, and he says,
Speaker 1: there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Speaker 1: What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
Speaker 1: and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 1: the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
Speaker 1: and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you. In your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. I don't know what it
Speaker 1: means to you in my life and my work, but
Speaker 1: I can tell you what it reminds me of, which
Speaker 1: is one of the really sort of strange and interesting
Speaker 1: things about human biology and performance is the system. Meaning
Speaker 1: our biology is designed in a very weird way at
Speaker 1: every level to go where you look, where you put
Speaker 1: your attention is where you end up. And this is
Speaker 1: very very clear in action sports, where I've done a
Speaker 1: lot of research, where if you want to, for example,
Speaker 1: surf a tube, everything that has to take place in
Speaker 1: that tube takes place basically too faster you to react.
Speaker 1: All you can really do is put your eyes on
Speaker 1: the end of the tube and you go there. When
Speaker 1: you want to ski a really hard straight bine, right,
Speaker 1: you get to the point where you put your eyes
Speaker 1: on the exit and you go there. We're goal directed
Speaker 1: machines on the internally, and what that essentially means is
Speaker 1: we don't live in reality. We live in a world
Speaker 1: that's shaped predominantly by our fears and our goals, and
Speaker 1: in a sense, on an internal level, with those goals,
Speaker 1: the way sort of consciousness of biology is designed to work.
Speaker 1: Once again, you go where you look, you go where
Speaker 1: you put your attentions. So I guess in the sense
Speaker 1: it depends on which one you feed, is roughly the
Speaker 1: same as a neurobiological principle, which essentially, we go, we
Speaker 1: real lucky, we go, we put our attention. So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna start us in an unusual place. It's near the
Speaker 1: end of your book. Can you describe having lime disease
Speaker 1: and you describe going out and starting to surf, and
Speaker 1: you describe starting to have these mystical experiences. I'm wondering
Speaker 1: if you could share a little bit more about that,
Speaker 1: and I'm kind of curious whether they've still continued for you.
Speaker 1: And then I want to ground some of that back
Speaker 1: into what the science tells us, because you've done a
Speaker 1: great job of taking these mystical experiences and bringing them
Speaker 1: back to some of why we think they might be occurring. So,
Speaker 1: as you pointed out, when I was about thirty, I
Speaker 1: was very sick. I got lime disease, and I spent
Speaker 1: the better portion of three years in bed, and towards
Speaker 1: the end, I got dragged out to the Pacific Ocean
Speaker 1: and put on a surfboard. And this was at a
Speaker 1: time that I could barely walk across the room. I
Speaker 1: could focus and think, clear headed and pain free and whatever,
Speaker 1: maybe thirty minutes a day, and every everything else was
Speaker 1: just fuzzy and painful. And I was out there maybe
Speaker 1: thirty seconds in a wave came and I literally probably
Speaker 1: took all the energy I had left in the world,
Speaker 1: and I spun my board around and I popped to
Speaker 1: my feet, and I popped into a domesion of time
Speaker 1: I didn't even know exist. At times seemed to slow down.
Speaker 1: I had slid out of body experience where I felt
Speaker 1: like I was hugging about my body and sort of
Speaker 1: watching myself, but like I had panoramic vision. Um. The
Speaker 1: most amazing part was that I was clear headed and
Speaker 1: I felt I felt great, and I hadn't felt even
Speaker 1: close vaguely normal for three years, so it was astounding.
Speaker 1: And I felt so good that day, and that experience
Speaker 1: was so wild that I ended up catching four more waves.
Speaker 1: And then when that was over, I was done, and
Speaker 1: I was exhausted, and my friends took me home with
Speaker 1: me in the bed and didn't move again for about
Speaker 1: fourteen days. Fifteen day walk again, I caught a ride
Speaker 1: to 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 about six eight months, I wasn't what
Speaker 1: from about ten percent functional, meaning like I was functional
Speaker 1: about ten percent time, about eight functional, And the only
Speaker 1: thing that I was doing different in my life was
Speaker 1: going surfing and having these quasi mystical experiences in the waves.
Speaker 1: So I was obviously very very curious about what the
Speaker 1: hell was going on because surfing is not a known
Speaker 1: cure for chronic autoimmune conditions, and I'm a rational materialist,
Speaker 1: I'm a science guy. I don't have mystical experiences, and
Speaker 1: lime is only fatal if it gets into your brain.
Speaker 1: So I was pretty sure that the real even though
Speaker 1: I was feeling better, the reason I was having these
Speaker 1: quasi mystical experiences is because the disease had gotten my brain.
Speaker 1: And so I lit on a giant quest to figure
Speaker 1: out what the heck was going on, and I very
Speaker 1: quickly discovered that these cause I missed the experiences I
Speaker 1: have names would call them flow states, and once you
Speaker 1: start to understand the neurobiology of flow what's going on
Speaker 1: in the brain, a lot of these so called mystical
Speaker 1: experiences that show up with this state are obviously very
Speaker 1: explainable be a biology. But the second half of this
Speaker 1: question is am I still having these experiences today? Am
Speaker 1: I still getting them to flow today? Yes? I'm still
Speaker 1: getting into flow today. And so would you have described
Speaker 1: them as mystical then because you didn't know what else
Speaker 1: to call them and you weren't as experienced with being
Speaker 1: in flow? Well, time slows down. I had an out
Speaker 1: a body experience. These are normally things that are classified
Speaker 1: as mystical experiences, right, time dilation now, but I didn't
Speaker 1: know at the time as time dilation, which is the
Speaker 1: time has extrangely speed upward and slow down. That's actually
Speaker 1: a foundational property of flow. It's one of the six
Speaker 1: psychological characteristics that are used to describe the state. So
Speaker 1: some form of time dilation, usually time speeds up right
Speaker 1: you you sit down and write a quick email. It's
Speaker 1: so sucked into what you're doing that an hour goes
Speaker 1: by you look up and you're like, where did time go?
Speaker 1: That's what happens most of the time and flow. Occasionally, though,
Speaker 1: you get that freeze from effect that happened me in
Speaker 1: the waves, or it's from your enemy has been a
Speaker 1: car crash. So let's swing now all the way back
Speaker 1: around to kind of the beginning of the book. The
Speaker 1: book is called The Art of Impossible, and you describe
Speaker 1: two levels of impossible. There's impossible, as in like somebody
Speaker 1: being able to run the four minute mile, which was
Speaker 1: once thought of as impossible. So that's one type. But
Speaker 1: you describe another type of impossible that might apply to
Speaker 1: more of the people listening than trying to break a
Speaker 1: record that's never been broken as an example. Well, I
Speaker 1: think it all applies to everybody. Let's explain what I
Speaker 1: mean by that. I have spent my career studying those
Speaker 1: moments in time when the impossible it comes to possible.
Speaker 1: I've done this in sports, I've done this in science
Speaker 1: and technology and business. Um. Culture. UM. That's what I
Speaker 1: call capital I impossible, doing that which has never been done.
Speaker 1: And what you just mentioned is lower case impossible. There's
Speaker 1: small I impossible, which is sincely who I wrote the
Speaker 1: book for work right, lessons learned from those people who
Speaker 1: have accomplished capital impossible. It is for anybody who's going
Speaker 1: after lower case I impossible, lower case impossible those things
Speaker 1: we think are impossible for ourselves. I'll give you a
Speaker 1: simple example from the book. I grew up in Cleveland,
Speaker 1: Ohio in the nineteen seventies. It was a blue collar
Speaker 1: steel milltown, and I wanted to be a writer. I
Speaker 1: mean I wanted to be a writer from the that
Speaker 1: was five or six years old. I didn't know any writers.
Speaker 1: I know how you became a writer. There was no
Speaker 1: one run around to ask. There was no Internet, there
Speaker 1: were no book street. It was a lower case I impossible,
Speaker 1: meaning there was no clear path from where I am
Speaker 1: to where I want to get to, and statistically not
Speaker 1: great odds of success. What are other lower case I impossible?
Speaker 1: That we all kind are more familiar with getting paid
Speaker 1: for what you love to do, overcoming trauma, overcoming an addiction,
Speaker 1: becoming world class, and anything to do becoming a successful
Speaker 1: or artists missing one obvious one that that that's eluding
Speaker 1: me that I like to grab for. But thinking paints
Speaker 1: a good picture. But I want to point out a
Speaker 1: couple of things just to frame this up so people
Speaker 1: understand something. When we talk about peak human performance, we're
Speaker 1: talking about nothing more or less, I guess, than getting
Speaker 1: our biology to work for us rather than against us.
Speaker 1: That's all that peak human performances. And what this means
Speaker 1: is if your goal is capital I impossible, that which
Speaker 1: has never been done, well, that's the biology you're going
Speaker 1: to draw. That's how you're going to do it. If
Speaker 1: your goal is small eye impossible, well the biology is
Speaker 1: the same, The tools are the same. In fact, if
Speaker 1: your goal is man small I impossible, cap fun that
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to get through Monday, right, like, it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter. The biology is the same. This set of
Speaker 1: tools are the same because evolution shaped human beings and
Speaker 1: the work that I do involves figuring out how to
Speaker 1: optimize that biology and its scales. Meaning it's the same
Speaker 1: in everyone or at the Flurrysearch collective, we train on
Speaker 1: average about a thousand people a month, and we train
Speaker 1: already from kind of members of the US Special Forces
Speaker 1: and professional athletes and see suite executive CEOs of major
Speaker 1: companies all the way to like soccer moms from Ohio
Speaker 1: and insurance workers from Indiana and you know, software counters
Speaker 1: from Bangalore. Right. Because the work that I do is
Speaker 1: built on biology, principles apply to everybody and anybody can
Speaker 1: use them. In the book you talk about biology scaling,
Speaker 1: but personality doesn't. And so the principles that we're going
Speaker 1: to spend a little bit of time talking about, and
Speaker 1: as I mentioned from the number of notes I took,
Speaker 1: we're going to skim the very slightest surface of But
Speaker 1: the principles that were about to cover, you're saying are
Speaker 1: happening at the level of biology, regardless of what our
Speaker 1: psychology might be. Yes, personality, what your genetics are. Now,
Speaker 1: if you're not six ten, you know you're impossible is
Speaker 1: to be a center in the n b A in
Speaker 1: your four ft nine Okay, this is not what we're
Speaker 1: talking about, right, Like that needed different Like, yeah, you
Speaker 1: need a different book. I can't help you with the
Speaker 1: genetics park at all. Like that's a different thing. But
Speaker 1: barring that, yes, biology scales. My work is centered on
Speaker 1: the state of performance known as flow. Right, we talked
Speaker 1: about flow as what I was experiencing out in the waves.
Speaker 1: It is, as I alluded to, it's defined as an
Speaker 1: optimal state of consciousness. We will feel our best and
Speaker 1: we perform our best. More specifically, it's any of those
Speaker 1: moments of rapt attention, total absorption. You get so focused
Speaker 1: on what you're doing that everything else just disappears right
Speaker 1: time dialects. As we talked about, your sense of self disappears.
Speaker 1: Actually awareness will start to marge in. All aspects of performance,
Speaker 1: both mental and physical, go through the roof. We can
Speaker 1: talk about how what through the roof actually means huge
Speaker 1: boosts in motivation, grit, productivity, creativity, learning, empathy, perspectives, a
Speaker 1: little bit of strength, stamina, fast rich washer, plants, a
Speaker 1: couple other things. We've talking about where the why later,
Speaker 1: But the point I want to make is those are
Speaker 1: basically all the things you want to accelerate for. 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 hard wired for peak performance.
Speaker 1: There are other things going on during peak performance and
Speaker 1: other things that lead to it, but it flow is
Speaker 1: at the center of it. And one of the most
Speaker 1: well established facts in flow science is that the state
Speaker 1: is universal, shows up in anyone anywhere, providing certain initial
Speaker 1: conditions are meant so everybody watching this, listening to this
Speaker 1: can get into flow and you can get this same
Speaker 1: boost in performance. So for starters, that's one thing that
Speaker 1: we're talking about. When you say biology scales excellent, and
Speaker 1: you've written about flow elsewhere, it's been part of your
Speaker 1: writing for a while now, and so you say that
Speaker 1: this book expands upon that. Right, It certainly talks about
Speaker 1: we need flow, but we also have to train up
Speaker 1: some of the other skills like motivation, learning, and creativity.
Speaker 1: So a lot of the book is really talking about
Speaker 1: how we increase our motivation, how we increase our learning,
Speaker 1: and how we increase our creativity. So talk about how
Speaker 1: flow ties together with those three things. So, as I said,
Speaker 1: peak performance is getting our biology to work for us
Speaker 1: or then against us. What is that biology? What are
Speaker 1: the sets of skills being amplified motivation, learning, creativity, and flow?
Speaker 1: That is what we mean by cognitive peak performance. The
Speaker 1: way to think about this is, in any situation, any challenge,
Speaker 1: motivation is what gets you into the game. Learning is
Speaker 1: what allows you to continue to play, especially if you're
Speaker 1: going after like high hard goals that are that are complicated,
Speaker 1: quite not get their creativities. How you steer right create
Speaker 1: problem solving that you steer and low is how you
Speaker 1: sort of turbo boast all those things sort of beyond
Speaker 1: reasonable expectations. But you asked a sort of different question,
Speaker 1: which is sort of where I got stuck thinking out,
Speaker 1: like which way to frame this? How they relate is interesting. So,
Speaker 1: as you pointed out, I've been doing this a long time.
Speaker 1: I've been training people in flow for years and years
Speaker 1: and years. I think I've probably spoken to or trained
Speaker 1: a quarter million people. Is that I guess my staff
Speaker 1: has come up with. I don't know if it's right
Speaker 1: or not, but somewhere around there's a lot of people.
Speaker 1: And what we've learned about flow over the past ten
Speaker 1: to fifteen years is more about the neurobiology of flow,
Speaker 1: what's going on in the brain and the body when
Speaker 1: we're in this state. And psychology is useful, but it's
Speaker 1: often metaphor. Neurobiology is mechanism. So if you want to
Speaker 1: make something reliable and repeatable, you want mechanism. So that
Speaker 1: is what has happened. We've got very good at training flow.
Speaker 1: And when I say very good, I said that the
Speaker 1: Flow Research Collective we trained about a thousand people a month.
Speaker 1: We measure flow with the standard psychological instrument pre and post,
Speaker 1: and we see about a seventy boost in flow consistently
Speaker 1: back into our trainings. But but and button is how
Speaker 1: everything is related. What we used to see is you
Speaker 1: get this big burst and flow because it turns out
Speaker 1: this is easy to train, and then there will be
Speaker 1: the spectacular return to baseline, like they give a ton
Speaker 1: of flow and then it would just like somebody turned
Speaker 1: off the flow tap and flow is one of the
Speaker 1: most pleasurable, addictive, meaningful, life affirming experiences we can possibly have.
Speaker 1: And you give people a whole lot more of that
Speaker 1: and then you take it away or stop showing up.
Speaker 1: You have very piste off people, and we had very
Speaker 1: piste off people. And so it's been a really long
Speaker 1: time trying to figure out what the hell is going wrong?
Speaker 1: What is this? And what we realized is the problem
Speaker 1: wasn't flow. It was that all the stuff that flow amplifies,
Speaker 1: but specifically motivation, learning and creativity, if you hadn't trained
Speaker 1: those things up at alongside flow, you couldn't keep pace
Speaker 1: with the acceleration that the state provided. And worse, when
Speaker 1: psychologists and researchers talking about motivation, the term is technically
Speaker 1: defined is the energy for action, But what they really
Speaker 1: mean is a whole bunch of stump motivations that catch
Speaker 1: all term for external motivation or extrinsic motivations, so like money, sex, fame,
Speaker 1: things in the world that we want intrinsic motivation, internal
Speaker 1: motivators like curiosity or passion or purpose. We're also talking
Speaker 1: about goal setting and grit. And if you haven't done
Speaker 1: really good grit work right, flows is enormously pleasurable experience,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't last forever, and you haven't done the good,
Speaker 1: selling good work, there are gonna be days where there's
Speaker 1: no flow the right and it's just hard work, hard slogging.
Speaker 1: And if you haven't done the work to develop really
Speaker 1: good grit skills, those days are going to be very,
Speaker 1: very difficult. They get a little easier because of flow,
Speaker 1: and we know that flow massively aquifies grit. But some
Speaker 1: people have this problem when they do this flow work,
Speaker 1: where they start to feel that it's a bliss chunky problem.
Speaker 1: Flow is so addictively pleasurable right there, like, oh dude,
Speaker 1: everything's got to feel is good. This is not life
Speaker 1: supposed to feel well, No, no, it's not. And there's
Speaker 1: times when you can't get into flow and you haven't
Speaker 1: done the really hardcore grit work, you can't sustain the flow.
Speaker 1: It's not simple but important. I think, yeah, absolutely, that
Speaker 1: really covered it. And I think you make that point
Speaker 1: a bunch of times, and I think it's an important
Speaker 1: one that on our way too impossible flow is an
Speaker 1: absolute booster, necessary but not sufficient, yep. And that it
Speaker 1: feels really good. But along the way too impossible, there's
Speaker 1: gonna be a lot of feeling not very good also,
Speaker 1: And if all we're thinking about is oh a lot,
Speaker 1: like you said, I should be feeling flow, I should
Speaker 1: be feeling good. This should always be wonderful, we won't
Speaker 1: have what it takes to keep going all the way
Speaker 1: too impossible, because there are times it's not easy. The
Speaker 1: way I put it in the book, I think more
Speaker 1: we're 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 is happy
Speaker 1: is how do you feel right here, right now? There's
Speaker 1: not a whole lot you can do about that level.
Speaker 1: Right you can make yourself as Dan Harris said, tenders
Speaker 1: unhappier gratitude practices, mindfulness practice is regular. Actually there's stuff
Speaker 1: you can do, but because of how emotional set points work,
Speaker 1: those points are set up usually by ten eleven years old.
Speaker 1: And this is the worst we're going to feel and
Speaker 1: is the best we're gonna feel in our lives. Gonna
Speaker 1: take place pretty much in the middle and borrowing chronic
Speaker 1: unemployment or the death of a child. On the low end,
Speaker 1: that's the low end. It doesn't move. It's pretty set.
Speaker 1: High end can move with constant postures flow, but it's
Speaker 1: generally doesn't. In other words, you can get tenders and happy,
Speaker 1: that's about it. And flow is no guarantee that you're
Speaker 1: going to be happier because flow takes place when we're
Speaker 1: pushing on our skills to the utmost. So usually when
Speaker 1: we're doing that, we're uncomfortable. And if you're really a
Speaker 1: peak performer, you're going to be uncomfortable so all the time, right,
Speaker 1: because you're always sort of trying to push on your
Speaker 1: skills and be a little better, and be a little better,
Speaker 1: you get very good at being uncomfortable, comfortable being uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: but moment to moment happiness probably doesn't move much. The
Speaker 1: next two levels of happiness available to you being the
Speaker 1: second level of high flow lifestyle. Right, it's a lifestyle
Speaker 1: in which you get regular access to flow. This could
Speaker 1: be doesn't matter what you do, but maybe what you
Speaker 1: do doesn't produce a lot of flow. I live in
Speaker 1: how and all around me there's tons of people who
Speaker 1: work whatever job they can get in the summer so
Speaker 1: they can ski all winner. That's a high flow lifestyle, right.
Speaker 1: The best we get to feel all the planet is
Speaker 1: a high flow lifestyle where the thing that is giving
Speaker 1: us the most flow is coupled to our purpose. And
Speaker 1: you know, as a guy who my wife and I
Speaker 1: ran an animal sanctuary, I'm kind of in a very
Speaker 1: very very poor rural county for a very long time
Speaker 1: with a lot of animal cruelty. That's a very high
Speaker 1: flow lifestyle with a lot of purpose. It was also
Speaker 1: pretty miserable, grueling, difficult work. It produced a lot of
Speaker 1: flow along the way and a lot of meaning. My
Speaker 1: point is that that kind of work produces deep meaning,
Speaker 1: deep contentment, deep purpose, deep peace. Even but happiness is
Speaker 1: a thin drug. Ultimately, that's I think what you start
Speaker 1: to discover overview. It's not that you don't want to
Speaker 1: be happy, it's that it's a thin drug and there
Speaker 1: are much better drugs out there right right, and often
Speaker 1: aiming right at happiness. Is that being the goal is
Speaker 1: particularly counterproductive? Oh yeah, it's a good way to miss it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a good way to miss it. So what I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do from here is we're just gonna skip through
Speaker 1: a few different parts of the book and hit some
Speaker 1: different things that bring together some of these different components
Speaker 1: of motivation, learning, and curiosity. So I want to talk
Speaker 1: about motivation for a minute, because you talk about there
Speaker 1: being a stack that's really important in the drive part
Speaker 1: of motivation, which we would think of is the way
Speaker 1: most people typically think of motivation as I feel like
Speaker 1: doing something right, I have the energy to want to
Speaker 1: do something. And you mentioned that there are really five
Speaker 1: things that make up this drive stack. You talk about curiosity, passion, purpose,
Speaker 1: and then autonomy and mastery. After those, I'm wondering if
Speaker 1: we could talk a little bit about curiosity, because the
Speaker 1: way that you laid out for people to find some
Speaker 1: of their curiosity I really loved. I really liked some
Speaker 1: of the exercises that were there, and so I was
Speaker 1: wondering if you could walk us through briefly the basic
Speaker 1: exercise and how somebody can start to find maybe what
Speaker 1: their curiosity is. I hear this up from a lot
Speaker 1: of people. I don't quite know what it is. How
Speaker 1: you cultivate a passion by sort of going through the
Speaker 1: gate of curiosity. I guess we'll be a better way
Speaker 1: to say it. So, as you pointed out, there are
Speaker 1: a bunch of intrinsic motivators. There are way more than
Speaker 1: the five you mentioned curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, master but
Speaker 1: those tend in the science to be the biggest five. Right.
Speaker 1: You could list intrinsic motivators forever, but those are the
Speaker 1: biggest five. And what the research shows is that if
Speaker 1: you want more motivations in your life, you actually start
Speaker 1: with extrinsic motivators. You've got to start like with you
Speaker 1: need enough money in a sense to take care of
Speaker 1: basic safety and security needs. You have to add deal
Speaker 1: safety and security first. Now it's a little bit. What
Speaker 1: the research shows is you basically have to be able
Speaker 1: to pay all your bills and have a little left
Speaker 1: over for discretionary spending. A little it's not a lot.
Speaker 1: Once that's in place, if you want more motivation, more productivity,
Speaker 1: more energy for action. Turns out it's not that we
Speaker 1: stopped wanting things like money, sex and fame. We still
Speaker 1: want them, but as a driver of performance and productivity,
Speaker 1: they're not as powerful as internal motivators are intrinsic drivers,
Speaker 1: and there's five of them, as you pointed out, Curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy,
Speaker 1: and mastery. These are the big five. And what you
Speaker 1: notice among peak performers everywhere is much in the way
Speaker 1: that you like anybody. An athlete will like stack fuel sources,
Speaker 1: meaning they're always going to hydrate super well. They're going
Speaker 1: to make sure they have enough protein and carbs and
Speaker 1: fats and blah blah blah right, and the right nutrition
Speaker 1: and the right supplements in the right everything. You also
Speaker 1: want to stack internal fuel sources. It's hard to do
Speaker 1: anything in this world, and it's hard to go after
Speaker 1: anything high hard goals. You need as many of internal
Speaker 1: fuel sources as you possibly can get. In other you want.
Speaker 1: All your intrinsic motivators are big five aligned and point
Speaker 1: in the same direction, and they're actually built that way.
Speaker 1: They're built to come online a certain order and to
Speaker 1: point us in direction. And as you pointed out, the
Speaker 1: most foundational human motivators curiosity. So, whether way, what's the
Speaker 1: big deal about intrinsic motivators? Like, why do we even care?
Speaker 1: Why are we having this conversation? Intrinsic motivators give us
Speaker 1: focus for free. That's the really big deal. Your brain
Speaker 1: takes about of your energy at rest, and it's yet
Speaker 1: it's two percent of your body weight. It's a giant
Speaker 1: energy hog, right, and focus is a huge, huge, huge
Speaker 1: caloric energy expense. You're curious about it. You're paying attention
Speaker 1: 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 gonna spend
Speaker 1: your whole life, you know, totally paying attention to all
Speaker 1: the time. But if you can figure out where three
Speaker 1: or four year curiosities intersect and get a couple of
Speaker 1: easy wins there and get some other things going on
Speaker 1: that I talked about in the Art of 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. The Passion Recipe dot com,
Speaker 1: which is we basically took these chapters because this was
Speaker 1: so important to so many people. We turn it into
Speaker 1: an interactive workbook. It's free. We just put it online
Speaker 1: for people, um the Passion recipe dot com. It teaches
Speaker 1: you how to cultivate and turn curiosity into passion and
Speaker 1: turn 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. And all I mean by interested it
Speaker 1: is so you're a free weekend, you would maybe want
Speaker 1: to spend it watching a couple of 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 trying 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. I loved your punk rock analogy.
Speaker 1: You gotta you gotta give the if you remember. Don't
Speaker 1: be interested in punk rock. Right, don't be interested in
Speaker 1: punk rock. Be interested. I think it was the evolution
Speaker 1: of political punk from crass to ry is against Um
Speaker 1: had an old girlfriend who lived in the original Crafts
Speaker 1: Commune And uh, I don't know. I'm just a huge
Speaker 1: rise against fan, I guess, but which is true? Do
Speaker 1: you love against Me? I do love against Me? They
Speaker 1: got a little more melodic. I really like early against Me.
Speaker 1: It's a little too poppy for me. Like it's not
Speaker 1: quite as punk as they were, and I like the
Speaker 1: older punk better. But I really do like Against Me
Speaker 1: a lot. They've got a handful of my absolute favorite
Speaker 1: punk songs ever, Miami Baby, I'm an Anarchist. Yeah. They're
Speaker 1: live record that they put out. I love it. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you love it. It's so good. The
Speaker 1: live version of the lyric is Convol's yea, what the
Speaker 1: hell from her lips to God's Ears? I think that's
Speaker 1: the name of the song from Her Lips to God's Ears.
Speaker 1: The live version of that is really good. Um, and Potatoes,
Speaker 1: rice and Beans live is really good on that album
Speaker 1: as well. They're amazing live band. So we've we've railed
Speaker 1: ourselves now. But back to plunk is something. Now you've
Speaker 1: got my attention. Maybe we'll see if we lead back
Speaker 1: around to it. So we're making a list of things
Speaker 1: things you're interested in, and then you just want to
Speaker 1: look for places they intersect. So you know I said nut,
Speaker 1: Let's say nutrition is also on your list. Um again,
Speaker 1: too vague, right, you're interested in the past blocking mechanics
Speaker 1: to play left tackle and nutrition is too big. But
Speaker 1: maybe you're the example. Like, given the book, insects as
Speaker 1: a few food source, right, so where could it possibly intersect? Well,
Speaker 1: it requires a lot of calories to play left tackle, right,
Speaker 1: would insects make a good football food? That's an intersection?
Speaker 1: And all I say is when you find those intersections,
Speaker 1: play there for a while. Just play there, go there,
Speaker 1: hang out, spend ten minutes twenty minutes a day, do
Speaker 1: this over months and months and months. Test out those intersections.
Speaker 1: See which ones are really sticky and grabby for you.
Speaker 1: Where there's a lot of energy. But if you can
Speaker 1: figure out where three or four or of your curiosities
Speaker 1: intersect and start playing there and learning stuff and getting
Speaker 1: some easy wins along the way, that's how we build passion.
Speaker 1: A couple of things that are worth pointing out, though,
Speaker 1: because people have this problem when they start cultivating passion,
Speaker 1: is they think about passion. I say, you know, give
Speaker 1: me an example of athletic passion. You get like Lebron
Speaker 1: James coming in for the dunk, you know, with the
Speaker 1: skull on his face and the finals, right, And yes,
Speaker 1: you're right, that is passion. But that is a late
Speaker 1: stage passion. That is not what early stage passion looks
Speaker 1: like or feels like. Early stage passion is just a
Speaker 1: little kid standing in the driveway trying to get a
Speaker 1: basketball to drop, and it feels like that on the inside, right,
Speaker 1: It feels more like curiosity and little successes than like
Speaker 1: this burning, consuming thing that you think if you expect
Speaker 1: to this like giant burning fire all at once, it's
Speaker 1: not going to be there. And the other thing is
Speaker 1: you don't want it. They're right away. What you want
Speaker 1: to do is slowly cultivate your passion and make sure
Speaker 1: You've got it right, because you don't want to be
Speaker 1: a couple of years into this is my passion to
Speaker 1: discover Oh shit, it was only a phase, right. I
Speaker 1: don't actually want to spend the next two years on
Speaker 1: 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, and you want
Speaker 1: to go slowly here. This is not one one of
Speaker 1: those things in peak performance. Um, everybody can do this.
Speaker 1: Everybody can figure align their curiosities, built them into passion,
Speaker 1: build passion and a purpose. We're all biologically hardwired for it.
Speaker 1: We all can do it. But you want to do
Speaker 1: it slowly, and you don't want to be in a
Speaker 1: rush in this case, right. A lot of people are
Speaker 1: really impatient to be there already and get it. And
Speaker 1: and here you really don't The system, the biology is
Speaker 1: designed for this to be cultivated over time, and you
Speaker 1: don't want to make an error on this when this
Speaker 1: is one of those places where you gotta go slow
Speaker 1: to go fast. Yeah, I love you saying the book.
Speaker 1: You know, we often think of like you said passion,
Speaker 1: get obsessed, stay obsessed, and you say, you know, let's
Speaker 1: start with get curious, stay curious. All right, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: jump right out of that section, even though we could
Speaker 1: go from there into how to turn that passion into
Speaker 1: a purpose and you know, autonomy and mastery in that area.
Speaker 1: But I want to move into a little bit about grit,
Speaker 1: and I want to talk about the idea of learning
Speaker 1: to work with our thoughts as part of grit. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that's really key. So place to start, I guess is
Speaker 1: that the psychologists define grit. They often define it using
Speaker 1: angulated Duckworth's definition as the intersection of passion and perseverance.
Speaker 1: And I love Angela's work. She's exceptionally bright woman. She's
Speaker 1: done excepotlually great research. But when you talk to peak
Speaker 1: performers about grit, they actually say, hey, wait, they train
Speaker 1: six different kinds of grit skills and all sort of
Speaker 1: require different techniques, and in the end they sort of
Speaker 1: all will boil down to the same thing, but you
Speaker 1: have to train them independently for a while. The first
Speaker 1: is the perseverance, the grit we're all familiar with, right,
Speaker 1: kick me in in the teeth pudge me that gut
Speaker 1: doesn't matter. I'm still coming. And that's the that's the
Speaker 1: first level of great as often and by the way,
Speaker 1: it's if you want to train that level of grit,
Speaker 1: that level of perseverance, um you want to start physically.
Speaker 1: The research says, even if you want to train it cognitively,
Speaker 1: which is the question that you asked about, and we're
Speaker 1: going to get there, the place to start is physically
Speaker 1: and by perseverance. If you work out, you go to
Speaker 1: the gym and you normally do three sets of ten
Speaker 1: when you bench press, next time, do two sets of
Speaker 1: ten and one set of eleven, very very slowly. You
Speaker 1: just want to push outside your comfort zone a little
Speaker 1: bit at a time, over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: And here's the key, especially on perseverance side, because this
Speaker 1: is this is tricky and people miss this a lot.
Speaker 1: It's not enough to put in the hard work to
Speaker 1: get grittier. You have to notice. So you have to
Speaker 1: in other words, you got it. Yes, you've got to
Speaker 1: show up and do that x eleventh eleventh rep. You
Speaker 1: know every time you work out just for the next month,
Speaker 1: but you also got to remember at the end of
Speaker 1: the month to look back and go wow the entire time.
Speaker 1: Every time I had to do that eleventh breath, I
Speaker 1: got it. I'm tough enough to do that. You've got
Speaker 1: to remember to notice that you're developing grit along the way,
Speaker 1: which is really important because you have to trust that
Speaker 1: grit for it to really make a difference in your life.
Speaker 1: You need to being able to know that you go
Speaker 1: into the situation, you're actually grittier, right, Like you can
Speaker 1: handle a little bit more, which is why we want
Speaker 1: to do this for a long period time, and we
Speaker 1: want to pay attention to it. Once you've sort of
Speaker 1: become a little physically grittier. The next thing to pay
Speaker 1: attention to if you're interested in performance, if you're interested
Speaker 1: in getting through tomorrow, I think, is the grit to
Speaker 1: control your thoughts. You've got to pay attention to what's
Speaker 1: going on up here, because you know, if you're anything
Speaker 1: like me, it's bad upstairs a lot of the time, right,
Speaker 1: And so if I'm not kind of paying attention to
Speaker 1: what's going on in my head, it can often swallow me.
Speaker 1: There's a number of different ways to sort of tune
Speaker 1: your thoughts and work with this particular problem. Gratitude less
Speaker 1: or mindfulness, breathwork meditation. These are two really really great methods.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of other stuff you can do. If
Speaker 1: you're more kind of kinesthetically oriented like me, you may
Speaker 1: do you may prefer yoga to just straight up meditation,
Speaker 1: because there's some movement involved. But there's a lot of
Speaker 1: different ways to sort of get some space between kind
Speaker 1: of thought and emotion. There's a gap between thought and emotion.
Speaker 1: What we want to try to do is like stretch
Speaker 1: it out so that when the thought pops up before
Speaker 1: you get super ang and totally lose your taper at
Speaker 1: your wife or house or husband or howmever, you have
Speaker 1: a second to get in there and be like whoa, whoa, Right,
Speaker 1: really sure this is the reaction you want? You bring
Speaker 1: up a couple of different things here. One is this
Speaker 1: idea of using the phrase controlling our thoughts, which you
Speaker 1: then later sort of say, well, that's a little bit
Speaker 1: of a misnomer, right, any of us who have sat
Speaker 1: down to meditate. No, the initial sort of launch of
Speaker 1: a thought into our brain is not really a controllable phenomenon.
Speaker 1: What comes up is what comes up. It's really what
Speaker 1: we do after that. And I love that you talk
Speaker 1: about the self talk. You say self talk is really important.
Speaker 1: Here there's a quote in here from Michael Gervais that
Speaker 1: I absolutely love, and listeners will have heard me talk
Speaker 1: about this a lot. And he says that there's only
Speaker 1: two kinds of thoughts, those that constrictest or those that
Speaker 1: expand us. And I think that is such a powerful idea,
Speaker 1: you know, even and when decision making is this decision
Speaker 1: gonna make me bigger or smaller, it's gonna expand me
Speaker 1: or contract to me that 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 intern 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. We're like, oh, I like,
Speaker 1: not only do I know what you mean, I know
Speaker 1: what it feels like. That's who I love it too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I'll tell you something funny about this. This is
Speaker 1: not exactly in the art of impossible. We were having
Speaker 1: this conversation on this this phrase. So I was skiing
Speaker 1: week and half ago, one of the biggest lines I've
Speaker 1: ever skied of my life. And uh, there's a hundred
Speaker 1: foot straight line at the end of it, which means
Speaker 1: you don't get to turn for a hundred feet. You
Speaker 1: just like your pin between two rock walls, and you
Speaker 1: just have to hold keep it together until you get
Speaker 1: to the exit or you'll die. And it's terrifying. And
Speaker 1: I got into the straight line and my right ski
Speaker 1: hit a bunch of ice icicles actually that were fallen
Speaker 1: off the trees and into the run, and it was
Speaker 1: like my right ski was bouncing on marbles and the
Speaker 1: guy was skiming. I said later, it looked like I
Speaker 1: started to tip forward and like I was gonna somersault,
Speaker 1: which would have put me in the hospital easy possibly worse.
Speaker 1: And my internal experience, the way I described to afterwards,
Speaker 1: like my brain found another gear, which I appropriately referred
Speaker 1: to as fuck this. I'm not dying now, right, But
Speaker 1: I like, I got incredibly angry in the moment, like
Speaker 1: in rage, and I get what what he said is.
Speaker 1: It just looked like I sat back up and shot
Speaker 1: out of there. And I remember nothing at other than
Speaker 1: just being like, Wow, this is that feeling that precedes
Speaker 1: the I'm falling now, which precedes the i'mgoing to the
Speaker 1: hospital now. 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 expect like anger to be a
Speaker 1: thought that creates space, but in this particular case, this
Speaker 1: particular context, it was the only tool, right If I
Speaker 1: wouldn't have grabbed for something that would have given me
Speaker 1: a lot of testosterone and adrenaline at that moment, I
Speaker 1: had to fight against gravity, right like Isaicle stripped beforeward,
Speaker 1: which is really interesting. And we were talking about how
Speaker 1: sometimes thoughts that creates space are not going to be
Speaker 1: the obvious ones. Sometimes. That was what the conversation was,
Speaker 1: and I thought it was I thought it was an interesting,
Speaker 1: subtle point in one I hadn't thought about before. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a great story. We're nearing the end of our time,
Speaker 1: but let's hop scotch ahead in the book here, and
Speaker 1: I want to talk about another part that I absolutely loved,
Speaker 1: which was the five steps to learn anything. Wait wait, wait,
Speaker 1: wait wait, you left out the most important part of
Speaker 1: that title, the five steps to learn anything before you
Speaker 1: have a public opinion on it. Five not so easy
Speaker 1: steps to learn anything. Yes, you're right, five not so
Speaker 1: easy steps. Yes, I better add that to my outline.
Speaker 1: And you sort of talk about the other part of
Speaker 1: it that I loved is you're like, before I'm going
Speaker 1: to have a public opinion about something, I'm going to
Speaker 1: have gone through those And I remember thinking, boy, that
Speaker 1: would be refreshing for the world for more people to think, well,
Speaker 1: before I'm going to have an opinion on that, I'm
Speaker 1: going to go through these five steps. It was really practical,
Speaker 1: and it really sort of dovetailed in ways with my
Speaker 1: experience of learning things, and and there were some subtle
Speaker 1: these that I had not thought of before that I
Speaker 1: think will help me in the future. So let's just
Speaker 1: kind of go through them relatively quickly. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of detail in there, But here's the big idea. What's
Speaker 1: worth knowing is learning works a certain way in the brain.
Speaker 1: We're designed to learn in a certain way, and if
Speaker 1: you can sort of do that and harness that, you
Speaker 1: can get a lot farther faster. So in the five
Speaker 1: not so Easy steps, basically a lesson in how to
Speaker 1: read and how to learn from This is about knowledge acquisition,
Speaker 1: not skills acquisitions. So this is about how do you
Speaker 1: learn a subject. It's going to involve reading. And one
Speaker 1: of what I want to talk about now is what
Speaker 1: do you pay attention to do? Will you read? Because
Speaker 1: it's from a neurobiological standpoint, it's not what you think
Speaker 1: it is, and it's much more interesting when you actually
Speaker 1: know how the how the brain work is designed to
Speaker 1: work makes it so much easier. So the things that
Speaker 1: I talked about paying attention to when you're reading, when
Speaker 1: you're trying to learn, because it's not what you did
Speaker 1: in high school or what you did in school, and
Speaker 1: it's almost the exact opposite one. Your brain loves narrative.
Speaker 1: Your brain has caused an effect all the time, right,
Speaker 1: this caused this? Why? Because we want to know that,
Speaker 1: we want to know how to like create our future, right,
Speaker 1: we want to know if this causes this. I know
Speaker 1: how to get that, I know how to intervene, I
Speaker 1: know how it works. That's what a narrative is, That's
Speaker 1: what a story is. This happened. First, this happens, that,
Speaker 1: this happened. Third, Right, So when you're reading, one of
Speaker 1: the first things we want to pay attention to a
Speaker 1: little bit is history, the history of a subject. First
Speaker 1: of all, stop being intimidated by subjects. Just realized that
Speaker 1: any intellectual subject, whatever it is, it's just a voyage
Speaker 1: of discovery. Somebody a question, they answered that question. That
Speaker 1: led to another question, and somebody had another question and
Speaker 1: they answered that one of the right, that's the voyage
Speaker 1: of discovery. That is any subject, and it's a narrative.
Speaker 1: And so just pay a little bit of attention to
Speaker 1: the order. The narrative is the big Christmas tree. If
Speaker 1: you give your brain the Big Christmas tree, when the
Speaker 1: individual facts show up ornaments, you'll have an easier time
Speaker 1: remembering them because your brain is gonna be like, oh,
Speaker 1: this happened, and put this fact right there. It slots in.
Speaker 1: This is something your brain naturally does, so you're just
Speaker 1: taking advantage of kind of your own basic software there.
Speaker 1: The second thing you want to pay attention to is
Speaker 1: terminology jargon. And what I mean by that is, and
Speaker 1: I will be the first person I like, I have
Speaker 1: a flat rule in my company, and by my life.
Speaker 1: If somebody needs a lot of big words to explain it,
Speaker 1: they're probably lying. So that I learned as a journalist
Speaker 1: right for years and years and years, I met the
Speaker 1: smartest people on the planet, and most of them can
Speaker 1: explain their thing to you as if you were five
Speaker 1: years old. It's always the folks who don't quite know
Speaker 1: what they're talking about that make it really fancy. In
Speaker 1: my opinion, that said jargon, while super annoying, tends to
Speaker 1: be annoyingly precise and technical language often contains most of
Speaker 1: a subject. So when people talk about I need to
Speaker 1: learn a new subject, a large chunk of what they're
Speaker 1: actually saying is you need to learn vocabulary. So the
Speaker 1: way I do it is, when I'm reading one of
Speaker 1: these books, if I'm getting fancy language showed up that
Speaker 1: I don't understand. The first time I see the word,
Speaker 1: I ignored. The second that I see the word I ignored.
Speaker 1: If I see a technical word that's three, three or
Speaker 1: four times in the book, I look it up, and
Speaker 1: then every time I see it from that point on,
Speaker 1: I just say the definitional out loud, right Instead of
Speaker 1: reading the word, I read the definition until it starts
Speaker 1: to stick. And the reason is just by learning those definitions,
Speaker 1: you start to learn huge, huge, massive amounts about the subject,
Speaker 1: and then you have the overarching history. But here's the
Speaker 1: most important thing, and this is the secret to learning.
Speaker 1: When you're written a book, pay attention to what I
Speaker 1: call your emotional wows, those curiosity moments where you go,
Speaker 1: what the hell are that's so cool and its ideas
Speaker 1: start firing. The reason is this curiosity is neurobiologically a
Speaker 1: little bit of doping and a little bit of ara
Speaker 1: up and effort. Those are the two neurochemicals that appear
Speaker 1: on the brain that helped produce this decision of curiosity.
Speaker 1: But they do something else. They prime learning. When they're
Speaker 1: in our brain, we have a much easier time remembering
Speaker 1: what we're learning. So right down, this is the only
Speaker 1: thing I really take notes on when I when I
Speaker 1: read are my emotional wows? Oh on paid seventy seven.
Speaker 1: Here's this really cool idea about pattern recognition and the brain,
Speaker 1: and it reminds me of blah blah blah. I follow
Speaker 1: my curiosity that way, I remember it. I follow my
Speaker 1: brain through a subject. As long as you follow your
Speaker 1: curiosities through a subject. Now, by the way, this is
Speaker 1: not how you master a subject to passive test in college.
Speaker 1: This is not going to help you there. This is
Speaker 1: like actual, real, practical, real world applicable knowledge that you
Speaker 1: can do ship with passing a test. You have requirements
Speaker 1: for that test. This will help. But if you're read
Speaker 1: Ethan Frome in college and they're gonna ask you, you
Speaker 1: may want to write down more than just the emotional wows. Okay,
Speaker 1: so caveat there. But this will really really help because
Speaker 1: by following our curiosity, we're following our natural learning software.
Speaker 1: That's how I do it. The other thing that I
Speaker 1: always point out to people because people make this mistake.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's that we were taught this
Speaker 1: in school or we just assume this because it seems
Speaker 1: like common says don't always need to understand everything. Learning
Speaker 1: means being uncertainly internal experience of learning for everyone everyone
Speaker 1: in the world is I suck, I suck, I suck,
Speaker 1: I suck, I suck. Oh look, I don't suck anymore, right,
Speaker 1: that's the experience of it. In fact, my buddy Andrew
Speaker 1: Human is a Stanford neuroscientist. We do a lot of
Speaker 1: work with he says, you know, he does a lot
Speaker 1: of work with the Navy Seals, and he says, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things that peak performers, especially spec ops guys,
Speaker 1: know that everybody else doesn't is that peak performance it's
Speaker 1: always crawl, wall, run. And the biggest difference pieces between
Speaker 1: pea performers and everybody else is that peak performers know this,
Speaker 1: and everybody else show up and they're like, dude, man,
Speaker 1: I don't crawl, I don't even walk. I'm gonna figure
Speaker 1: out what the shortcut is. I'm gonna start by a jog, right,
Speaker 1: And peak performers show up and they're like, you know what, Okay,
Speaker 1: I gotta crawl. Then I'm gonna walk, and then maybe
Speaker 1: I'll run. And it's gonna suck. I suck, I suck,
Speaker 1: I suck, I suck, and there's nothing to do but
Speaker 1: to do it. And it's funny because you see these
Speaker 1: top performers and we often think, oh my god, they're
Speaker 1: so far ahead of the rest of us. How did
Speaker 1: they get there. One of the main ways they got
Speaker 1: there is every time they're faced with the challenge, they
Speaker 1: know it's gonna suck, and they just don't care. They
Speaker 1: just lean right In the rest of us, when faced
Speaker 1: with the challenge, we ditherer around for a while. We're
Speaker 1: eventually going to rise to the challenge and do the thing.
Speaker 1: You've got to get it done, sooner or later. You
Speaker 1: got to. But most of us are like, oh really,
Speaker 1: I got let me call my father and Tello about
Speaker 1: all the ship I got it. You know, we do
Speaker 1: all that, But big performers just like, nope, crawl walker on.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna lean and immediately. I loved that whole section,
Speaker 1: and I think what you just said there is a
Speaker 1: great place for us to wrap up the conversation, which
Speaker 1: is really that idea of crawl walk run. I talked
Speaker 1: about it all the time on the show. We just
Speaker 1: talked about this idea of you know, sometimes we've got
Speaker 1: to be willing to take baby steps. We've got to
Speaker 1: start where we are and move through the progression. I
Speaker 1: gotta tell you something. I think it's all baby steps,
Speaker 1: but you've just got to be willing to continue to
Speaker 1: take baby steps. One of the things I tell people
Speaker 1: this isn't a Drew, but as a general because of
Speaker 1: emotional set points, if you've sort of survived being a teenager,
Speaker 1: you've already felt just about the worst that life can
Speaker 1: offer you. I'm not saying you can't have that bad
Speaker 1: feeling for days and days and weeks and months on ends,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. But emotional set points are
Speaker 1: sort of set up by around you know, ten or
Speaker 1: eleven or twelve, by like bad experiences, good experiences, and
Speaker 1: most of life takes place in between. And then you
Speaker 1: get teenagers where your hormones are raging and you have
Speaker 1: no control of your emotions. So honestly, again, as I
Speaker 1: said earlier, unless there's the death of a child, the
Speaker 1: chronic unemployment, which can change this as a general rule,
Speaker 1: if you've survived being a teenager, you've suffered the worst
Speaker 1: that you're going to suffer on any peak performance path,
Speaker 1: taking those baby steps, which is a strange thing to realize,
Speaker 1: but it seems to be biologically true. Awesome, Well, Stephen,
Speaker 1: thank you so much. I found the book absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1: As I said, I took so many notes, my curiosity
Speaker 1: points of things that jumped off the page, because that's
Speaker 1: the way I prepare for these interviews what excites me.
Speaker 1: There were a ton of them. Well, thank you, I
Speaker 1: appreciate that. Thanks so much for taking the time to
Speaker 1: come on the show. I appreciate it my pleasure. Thank you.
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