The Era of Impossible, with Steven Kotler – Episode 431 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Steven Kotler, New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective, explains the mechanics of getting our biology to work for us rather than against us, the advantages of transitioning from a journalist to a scientist, how to trigger a state of flow, how cell phones are dumbing down our neurobiology, how to be 1,000% more productive in 2 days, why “flow” is not just for athletes and artists, the most common flow state on earth that every one of us has experienced every week, what Buddhists, nuns, and surfers have in common, why struggle and frustration are necessary to achieve flow and extraordinary = average + repetition, and finding moments where the impossible become possible.

About Steven:

Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. He is the author of 11 bestsellers (out of fourteen books), including The Art of Impossible, The Future is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 50 languages, and has appeared in over 100 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, TIME, and the Harvard Business Review.

A lifelong environmentalist and animal rights advocate, Steven is the cofounder of Planet Home, a conference/concert/innovation accelerator focused on solving critical environmental challenges, the cofounder of The Forest + Fire Collective, a network of individuals, organizations and institutions dedicated to ending catastrophic wildfire and restoring forest health to the American West. Alongside his wife, author Joy Nicholson, he is also the co-founder of Rancho de Chihuahua, a hospice care and special needs dog sanctuary.

Learn more at StevenKotler.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Stephanie Maas:
Okay, so I have to ask this is just totally random. It’s got nothing to do with anything. So on your chair, is that a blanket?

Steven Kotler:
It is a blanket.

Stephanie Maas:
Is it to protect the chair?

Steven Kotler:
It’s literally to protect the chair, mainly because my dog. Well, the dog who’s in the office with me is 120 pounds. He’s very big. His claws are significant. And he will at least once a day come over, like try to pull me and he destroyed the previous desk chair. So I’ve learned.

Stephanie Maas:
Okay, well, so you want to actually dive into some things?

Steven Kotler:
I’ll go wherever you guys want to go.

Stephanie Maas:
Rockin. Okay, one of the things I think’s worth noting is in your group of advisors, you have 14 advisors on your website, 11 of the 14 are doctors. And a lot of what you focus on is not just these concepts, and the research that you’ve done to prove them, put them into action hone them, whatever is they are backed by this idea of science, medicine.

Steven Kotler:
Okay. So at the heart of most of my career, as a first journalist than as an author of writing books about these topics. Then, as a neuroscientist leading international team of researchers into these topics, the progression has been focused on peak human performance. And by peak human performance, I only mean getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. That’s all the definition of peak performance is it’s getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. And at the heart of that biology at the heart of my work is a state of consciousness, known to researchers as low, you may call it runner’s high or being in the zone or you play basketball as being unconscious, you’re a jazz musician, you’re in the pocket, the lingo is endless. Flow is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness, a state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best, more specifically refers to any of those moments that we’re all familiar with rapt attention, total absorption just gets so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you’re doing that everything else just starts to melt away and disappear. Sense itself self consciousness, the inner critic voice in your head that’s always on, it’s always telling you, you’re too fat, too dumb, too ugly, right? It shuts up. Finally, thank God, time passes strangely, most commonly, just get so sucked into what you’re doing that five hours go by, and like five minutes. Occasionally, sometimes it’s slow, it’ll slow down, you’re gonna freeze for impact. And throughout all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go to the roof. So at the flow research collective, what we do is we study, I’ll tell you about why this is the answer to like the science questions, the neurobiology of peak human performance, what’s going on in the brain and the body when people are performing at their very best, and flow is a big part of that equation. So the reason, there’s so many sort of neuroscientists on my board and that sort of stuff, and the reason we do all this work is this psychology of flow, which was very well established over the course of the 20th century, but the end of the 20th century, they were starting to train people using the psychology. And the problem with training from psychology is psychology is very, very individual. Right? It’s shaped by nurtured, shaped by nature, and really fundamental things to peak performance. Like, where are you on the introversion extroversion scale, meaning like, if you’re super introverted, I can’t teach you anything if there are other people around because you’re handicapped, right? Those kinds of things, where what are your risk tolerance is like, and what are they like in different situations, right? People have one level of physical risk tolerance and other level of emotional risk tolerance or sexual or intellectual, take your pick, right? Those are very individual psychology is very individual. But if you go one level down, you go to the neurobiology, neurobiology is shaped by evolution and its constant volume. And so if you’re looking to make things reliable, and repeatable neurobiology is your tool. I got very lucky in my career, I started as a journalist, and I was interested in interesting performance. I was also interested in neuroscience, it was a language I sort of spoke, and I probably the psychology I always felt like when I was trying to just improve myself as a writer, as an athlete, as a whatever, I was getting so confused, and they’re decent things. nitpicking arguments over crazy little details. And I’m like, none of this is practical. I don’t know what to do with this. And when I got into the neurobiology and figured out you could train from it, it really worked. And we, you know, at the flow research collective, teamed up with folks at Stanford and USC, and UCLA and et cetera, et cetera, and study that neurobiology that stuff and then we use it to train people in 103. Ready countries, which are intensive 1000s of people every month. And this is everything from like just individuals, right? Soccer moms and soccer, dads and insurance brokers and you know, podcasters, and take your pick all the way to professional athletes, members, Special Forces, and then companies or with like Facebook or center audience, blah, blah. The point I’m trying to make is wildly diverse group of people. It’s an intense training, you go through with it like a PhD psychologist, as a coach, we see us a 70 80% increase in flow on the back end. And the reason I’m telling you all this stuff is the reason you see so many doctors The reason the neurobiology matters so much as we want this liable and repeating over anyone, anywhere. That’s the benefit of all the science. And we’re also really big fans of the collective of what I like to call cognitive literacy. If you are interested in V performance, understand what’s going on in your brain in your body, when you’re actually performing at your best. You’re just I’m just arming you with information, right? Like, it’s really important to us. And you can actually, it’s also fun to teach people neuroscience, because most people think neuroscience is an incredibly difficult thing that they’re never going to be able to learn and it’s scary and all that stuff. And so it’s very empowering to people not only like when you start, you know, hey, this is how your brain works. And people start getting it using neuroscience, this thing that they didn’t think they could learn to actually massively improve their performance on a day to day basis. It’s a very sort of empowering to watch people go, Oh, my God, I can learn something like this. And I can use it. And I can, you know, impact by day to day life. It’s cool. When I came into flow signs, my goal was to put it on a hard science footing. This is what I wanted to do with my life. Because I came in as a journalist, I didn’t specialize when I first started looking at the puzzle. And people were having trouble solving. And I was like, that’s because the answers are in all these different disciplines. And scientists don’t talk to one another. They’re like everybody else, they’re balkanized in their disciplines, and people don’t actually realize how like even neuroscience how balkanized it is into like tiny micro disciplines, and they don’t talk to each other, they talk to journalists, who talk to everybody, or, you know, now in our approach, we take a very multidisciplinary approach to neuroscience for this very reason, because I want people from all these different disciplines, so people who don’t think like me, people who have wildly outside perspectives, who can, you know, come hammer on my ideas, our ideas, and our research and all that stuff. So long answer.

Stephanie Maas:
You commented on something in there, I think is super true. You mentioned the idea of this biology, neuroscience. You know, some people just have fears around it. I think a lot of it’s intimidation, you know, it just seems so foreign. It’s almost like it’s so language. So specifically, when you talk about, hey, getting our biology to work for us, not against us, can you put some legs under that table for me.

Steven Kotler:
Let me give you a bunch of really simple examples. So flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead in more flow, you will more flow in your life triggers or your toolkit, there are 26 known triggers, there are probably way more, that’s just what we’ve discovered. So far, they all have one thing calm, flow can only show up when all of our attention is in the right here, the right now on the task at hand. That’s what all the triggers do. They were a bunch of different ways neurobiologically, but they drive our attention into the now on to the task at hand. So this tells you that one of the first triggers the most obvious trigger is complete concentration. So when we train this, some of how we teach people about concentration is manicuring. The environment, part of our biology is that we have a salience detection system, when novelty shows up in the world, we notice it, right, this kept us alive. The problem is, we have cell phones that are literally designed to abuse this, right. They’ve been built, designed to resemble slot machines and how they try to get your attention. They use novelty to try to get your attention. We are not more powerful than this is hardwired biology, we’re not going to win that fight. So we teach people to practice distraction management, turn everything off ahead of time, right? Manicure the space because you’re not your biology is going to win, you’re not going to win this war, you literally are not going to win this war. How long should you completely concentrate on the task at hand? There’s another question, right? And there’s an actual precise answer to this. You gotta start by starting right. If you can get 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, it’s fine. And let me emphasize something here. When we talk about flow is peak performance. One of the things that goes through the roof is productivity. And we know this so McKinsey giant business consultancy went around the globe, they spent 10 years trying to figure out how much more productive executives are in flow than out of flow, on average was 500% more productive. So this means you get to work on Mondays, but Monday in a flow state to Tuesday through Friday off, you get as much done as your steady state peers two days a week in flow old days, which is difficult, but you’re 1,000% more productive than the competition’s huge boost in productivity, okay. So you will get time back for your life by I’ve manicuring a space for complete concentration. I’m asking you for time, we’re all busy, right? Everybody is busy, you’re gonna end up being so productive in this time that you’ll end up with getting time back. But research shows that you want 90 minutes to 110 minutes for complete concentration. Why 90 To 110 minutes? Well, it turns out, as I said, you want to start by starting, you get 10, if you can get 20. But the brain has a built in focusing slot, that’s nine out of 10 minutes long. Well, that’s weird. No, it’s not. Why because we know we go through sleep cycles, sleeping cycles, they’re 90 to 110 minutes long, that’s a REM cycle, that’s a full sleep cycle, just like we have a sleep cycle, we have a focus wake alert cycle, it’s the same line. So it turns out that as you train yourself to kind of focus and Biller, it’s very easy to build up to this 19 or 20 minutes, you have to get longer, there’s all kinds of stuff you have to kind of sort of do to extend beyond that. But to learn how to focus that long, it sort of built in. So these are just simple flow examples of getting our biology work for us, rather than against us. Another one is you want to start your work session, your complete concentration session. And of course, with your circadian rhythms. This is a no Duff for most people. But like, I wake up at four o’clock in the morning, that’s when my brain does its best work. I’m married to a night owl, we’re all a little bit different. And if you can, if your job permits it, you want to start your work session in accordance with your circadian rhythms, practicing distraction management on the front end, and with this 90 minute slot.

Stephanie Maas:
Fantastic examples and super relevant, which brings me to another thought. And I think based on your tenure in this industry, it seems like please correct me if I’m wrong, it seems like in the beginning, there was so much of this studied around especially athletes, you know, really getting them to get to the next level. And then I would say over the last 30 years, maybe…

Steven Kotler:
It was athletes, and it was artists, and the fault lies with both myself and were probably the two great popularizers of flow ideas. And Mike checks me I started out as an studying rock climbers in his initial study group, and he dancers and artists. And so that got into the literature. And then I made it worse because I wrote it on about athletes and flow. And when we heard about it the most, it was also, like Jimmie Johnson in the 90s co opted chicks and the idea to bring the Dallas Cowboys a couple of Super Bowl victories and got a lot of attention. A couple other things happen in sports. So like, it got the attention. But you’re absolutely right. In fact, if you go back to the early research on flow, early research, who gets the most flow? In the early research, there were two things that showed up. One most common flow state on Earth is reading period. So reading is the most conflict in earth. And let me give it let me take it a second one because this is even crazier. Is it going to the bathroom? No. Flow examples, these will say, like I meet people on you know about airports, they’re like, oh, yeah, the executive director, the flow research collective, we’re obviously an organization of plumbers. So okay, bad joke is side. Second most common flow said in this early research, I don’t know if it’s still true. So there’s two versions of the flow, there’s individual flow me and a flow state you and a flow state or this group flow, it’s a shared collective virtual flow state could be interpersonal flow to people lost in a great conversation, group flow to flow fourth quarter comeback in basketball, or football, or a great rock concert band is totally comes together, or Communitas. This is flow, it scales huge when you go to a rock concert, and everybody merges with the music near all clapping and sank. And that’s Communitas. Right? It’s float scale. So the most common besides reading is interpersonal flow to middle managers in an office environment, have a conversation at work, they get so sucked into the conversation that a couple hours go by. So neither of those examples, as you can imagine, involve artists or athletes. And it was so hard until we got a language around into that all the neurobiology until all this stuff came up. You know, whose flow mystical experience was. I mean, that was the first question. I looked at it my very first book on flow. I was talking to surfers, and they kept saying yeah, every time I’m in a tube, I become one with the ocean. I just one with the ocean, which like, that just sounds like a wild ass mystical experience. And today we can talk about these things out loud. Go back to the 80s and 90s and try talking about like, among serious people, right? You’re just gonna get laughed out of the room. But Dr. Andrew Newberg, my first mentor had just done the very first brain imaging to image Tibetan Buddhists and Franciscan nuns during ecstatic meditation when they felt the nones would feel one with Jesus and the Buddhists were one with the universe. And I called him because I saw his research I registration was like, dude, am I what we’re seeing with the surfers in this like state that I think we’re calling flow is that the same thing is going on? And he to his amazing credit, said, Well, I don’t know, but it sure sounds similar. So let’s find out together. And that was my sort of gateway. It wasn’t just that I was curious about this and I was working on this stuff he was that one of the best neuroscientists in the world said, I don’t know. But that’s a good question. And I’ll help you figure it out. And so that was sort of how all this started. But it was really in the beginning, it was really complicated to try to be looking at mystical experiences, are we looking at biological experiences, or the psychological of what’s going on? Not all these were questions that were have been answered over the past 30 years, but 30 years ago, when I got started, we didn’t have a clue. As to scientists, we spent the 90s. With a whole community of people, we had to prove that spiritual experiences were good for people before anybody would take this seriously. So there’s all these studies that go back to the 90s that discovered religious affiliation produces health and longevity. And you know, now we know why and where that comes from, and everything else. But literally, like there’s tons of studies where you had to in the 90s, you act before anybody size would take it seriously had to prove that like spirituality, mysticism, immune flow was good for people before you even take it seriously. So it’s been a long, slow kind of process.

Stephanie Maas:
But I think what is so great, though, yes, but your process to it, and the way you’ve done your research, legitimizes it. And I think that’s where you get this buy in? I mean, one, I think human curiosity, people start looking for it.

Steven Kotler:
It was also really important to me, you can’t do peak performance without flow you cannot like, so if you’re at the top of your field, I don’t care what your field is, if your top 30%, for example, you’re doing this stuff, like I’ve spent my career around the world with the most exceptional, extraordinary people who’ve done the impossible, right? That was my focus as a journalist, is those moments in time where impossible game possible? How did it happen? Flow is always part of the equation. So I bet all these people who have done the extraordinary, none of them, not any of them started out extraordinary. Scary. I like you and me. They’re average people, what they figured out is how their biology work. And they did it over and over and over and over again. And across the boards across the boards. This is true with every everybody I’ve met. And I say that I went out of my way, for three and a half decades to meet the most extraordinary people on the planet. It was my job. And so I did it for a living for a really long time. Who are you? What did you do? How did you do it? I started to realize I was like, Well, wait a minute, these people are just like us. So I want I want flow, I want to bring it into the mainstream. I want everybody to have access to this. Because a world where we’re all performing at our best. The other thing they said of this is when we’re in flow state automatically expands empathy and environmental awareness. We could talk about why that happens if you want, but so do I really care if insurance broker number 99 are salesman or saleswoman number 237 is really better at their job? Not a ton. But do I really think the world is better place if they’re more empathetic and wise and environmentally aware? Yes. So like, my trade is like, every wants flow, you can have it I want a more apathetic, environmentally aware, wise world. And so to me, like my desire to break into the mainstream is not about performance, it was more about but the mainstream also, I’m interested in what people can do, right? Like, these are just ordinary people who did extraordinary things in their life over and over and over, because they understood how flow work and how to get into this state, and how to utilize the properties, some of the other components of peak performance. So I’m always interested in that when I meet people, I’m always like, Okay, well, what’s possible in your life? What could you what might you be able to do? So flow makes us 500% more productive, it doubles learning rates to soldiers in flow. This is studies done by the US Department of Defense, learn to enter 40 to 500% faster than normal creativity, we did some of this work that it’s not Harvard University is Sydney, spikes 400 to 700%. Depending on how you’re measuring that you’ve got to stop and ask yourself, like, what kind of impossible challenges aren’t you going after? What would you go after, if you could be 500% more productive if you cut learning times and a half or 600%, more creative? And innovative? Those are huge numbers. I think that that’s those are real questions. So just scientifically accurate questions that we add. That’s what the science, performance is possible for all of us. So those are the questions that you have to sort of start to ask yourself that I’m real to you or to me, it’s really exciting and fun. And when I said when I said I wanted to smuggle this stuff into the mainstream, I want empathy. I want environmental awareness. I want wisdom, but I also want to see what everybody can do with this stuff. I mean, really tired of meeting people who are dead before they’re dead, really bugs me. I always tell people like look, aging is sort of a fact of life old is a mindset and for biologic reasons that mindset sets up in October. Want ease, and it has a massive impact on performance and our ability to access flow on all this stuff. And so anything that I can do to explode those ideas and make us make people understand how much more they’re actually capable of, to me, that’s good. That’s fun. I like that.

Stephanie Maas:
Yeah. Do you mind I want to give you my dad’s phone number, would you give him a call and talk to him about this age as a mindset, guess what he’s getting for Christmas, your book? I just want to comment on one thing, and there’s something I think that is so human to what you just said, because I heard in the beginning some of your journey of how and why and this and that, but it’s such an incredibly lovely side to you. Yes, you do want to see what people are capable of. But I want to see more empathy and environmental awareness to me. And I think to a lot of us, that’s your why then that’s lovely.

Steven Kotler:
Well, that’s I animals have always been my wife, my wife and I run a dog sanctuary to hospice care for dogs now for 20 years.

Stephanie Maas:
But you obviously care about humans, too. Yeah. I’m pretty introverted. And I’m like, I did you make a living off trying to make people better?

Steven Kotler:
No, and I do I do. I, I don’t like people as much as people think. All right. I don’t I don’t I like animals much more than I like people I’m really open about that. I find it very difficult to convince people that like, ecosystems are more important than their needs, which is a lot of the job. But if I can get you into flow, the states sort of start to do that automatically. That’s easier. This sales job or out environmental awareness is too hard. It’s too big of a lift, I’ve been tried for 40 years, you should end up shouting at the rain. So I’ve sticky This is the backdoor.

Stephanie Maas:
But that’s great. By making people better. You get your end goal.

Steven Kotler:
By making people better, they become better, right? Like, you want peak performance. That’s cool. I want to see what you do with the peak performance. Because if I’m just training you up in flows, you can like sell more widgets in your you know, widget sale light, like, okay, really, I mean, like, I’m interested in like, not blow my frickin mind when I started this. The other thing that’s really important here, Stephanie. So when I started out my career, I was interested in neuroscience, I was interested in peak performance, I started an action sports, right. And I was living in these communities. And this was during the 90s, the 90s, and action sports and surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding, all of it, it’s talked about as like the era of possible more impossible feats got accomplished stuff that never been done before. We didn’t think it was ever gonna be done than ever before. But I was in these communities. I was seeing it firsthand, talking to them, flow was always in the mix of like how they did it, right. But he was these people. So if you know anything at all about peak performance, or how do you raise a good kid, right, forget the right what matters. Well, Mom matters, nature inviter good environment, the right schools, the right blood, all that stuff matters. And yet everybody I knew these acts were athletes like that in the communities I was in. They came from broken homes, they had bad childhoods, they have very little money, it very little education, there’s a lot of risk taking these communities, there’s much substance abuse. And normally you put those things together in a community, people die young go to jail, they do not reinvent what’s possible for the human species. And that’s what I was seeing a fraud an in person all the time. So when I say that anybody can use flow to do the extraordinary. I’m not like talking about I’m talking about the people who started so far. You know what I mean? before they ever you hear a lot about people talking about how people started second base with third base, these people were starting so far beyond what before hopefully, it was a miracle that they even got an app that and yet it was these people who reinvented what was possible for our species. And that was what really caught me. In fact, actually, what I’ve discovered over time is, you know, who has a really tough time with peak performance. It’s not people who are really, really poor people who don’t have a lot of education or people who you know, all that stuff. It’s folks who had a really easy time in high school. If you were really popular if you were naturally smart, or naturally athletic and naturally, really pretty in high school was really easy for you. And you didn’t actually have to learn how to be ready. And like all how to regulate your emotions and do all that stuff. Those are the people that are very hard to train in peak performance. Actually, it turns out that the more you got your ass kicked earlier on, it’s almost it works for you later in life a lot.

Stephanie Maas:
Okay, now I’m gonna have to have you talk to my high school senior. We literally were just having the conversation yesterday. That Don’t worry, high school sucks. It sucks for most people. It’s okay. It gets better than this life gets better.

Steven Kotler:
One other thing I wanted to tell you since you have a high school senior because this is something nobody tells kids nobody tells anybody. It’s so important. So flow states have cycles. They’re not a binary it’s not in the zone out of zones, a four stage cycle and you got to move all the way through all four stages to get back into flow. You can’t live in a flow state there’s no permanent always on flow state because the cycle, the front end Have a flow state is called struggle. It is a loading phase, you are learning you are loading and overloading the brain with information. And here’s a couple things that we don’t tell our children that are really important one, when you’re in this struggle phase and this loading phase, frustration is literally built into how it works. You will get frustrated by design, you’re going to we have working memory it holds about four cusps wants to struggle properly, you have to overload it, you’re literally going to be frustrated. And most people and most kids are taught that frustration is a sign that you’re doing something wrong. Stop. This is failure. This is an in peak performance actually signing, moving in the right direction, you’re exactly where you need to be, doesn’t feel any better. But literally, this is how it’s supposed to feel. And we don’t teach that to kids. And so they get these bad feelings that they think that doing something wrong and being kids. They’re self conscious, they’re like it starts right it does all that other stuff, right? So you end up with this spiral off of this negative feeling. And that negative feeling is actually a positive feeling. It’s a sign that you’re moving in the right direction, because it helps us reframe frustration. And it turns out, the more we struggle, the more frustrated we are, the better chance we actually have of solving the problem in the end and learning the thing we’re trying to learn the more frustrated, the better. I’ve what I like to tell people is like take it to the point that your head’s about to explode in them walk away and just know that that feeling of my head’s gonna explode. I feel like a failure and it’s actually a sign that you’re doing exactly what you want to do.

Stephanie Maas:
Okay, I know you really are trying too hard to fight this. You’re pretty much a humanitarian

Steven Kotler:
Shut up.

Stephanie Maas:
Did you just tell me to shut up?

Steven Kotler:
I said out loud.

Stephanie Maas:
Don’t tell anybody, edit this immediately.