Author and researcher Steven Kotler lays out the pathways to the optimal state of consciousness called flow.
You’ll Learn:
- The golden rule of flow
- How to find flow using psychological and neurobiological triggers
- How to take breaks without interrupting your flow
About Steven
Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist and the cofounder/director of research for the Flow Genome Project. He is one of the world’s leading experts on ultimate human performance.
Items Mentioned in this Show:
- Sponsor: Happen to Your Career’s free 8 day course
- Steven’s Book: Stealing Fire with Jamie Wheal
- Steven’s Website: www.stevenkotler.com/
- Book: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Book: Song of the Dodo by David Quammen
- Book: The User Illusion by Tor Norrentranders
- Product: MUSE headband
- Study: Advanced Brain Monitoring
- Technique: Box breathing
- Technique: Pomodoro Technique
- TED Talk: Chris Berka, A Window on the Brain
- Website: www.facebook.com/flowgenome
Steven Kotler Interview Transcript
Pete Mockaitis
Steven, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.
Steven Kotler
Pete, it’s my pleasure.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, first things first, I got to know how you broke 82 bones.
Steven Kotler
It’s actually 83, but so, you know, I’ve spent essentially my entire career asking the same question which is, “How do people do the impossible? How do you level up your game like never before?” And I came to that question through a really weird door. I walked into the door of journalism and I became a journalist in the early 1990s, and back then action sports, so surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding and the like were really hot topics, and back then if you could write and ski, or write and rock climb, or write and surf there was work.
Couldn’t do any of those things super well but I really needed the work so I lied to my editors and I was sort of lucky enough to spend the better portion of a decade chasing professional extreme athletes around mountains and across oceans, and when you’re not a professional athlete you spend all your time chasing professional athletes around mountains and across oceans you break a lot of things.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay.
Steven Kotler
Which is how I ended up breaking 83 bones along the way.
Pete Mockaitis
So, I’m curious, now how many different bone-breaking episodes was it that accumulatively totaled 83?
Steven Kotler
Okay. So, when I was 16 years old I skied off a cliff in Switzerland and split my patella. Two weeks later after I got home out of the hospital I was in a car wreck and split my other patella. From that point on my legs did not fold properly, so when I started chasing professional athletes around mountains and across oceans, every time I impact that create a micro fracture into my legs.
So, when I had about 67 micro fractures they all turned into a major fracture. So, 67 of those happened over a really long period of time but they all kind of happened at once. It’s a very funny thing to go to your doctor’s office, the doctor looks at you, he holds up your X-ray and says, “All right, so how did you get here?” And I said, “Well, you know, I parked my car and I walked.” He said, “No, you didn’t. Don’t lie to me. You can’t walk. Look at your X-ray. How did you get here?” And I said, “Well, I walked.” And he said, “No, no, you’re lying to me. You can’t walk. Look at your X-ray,” which was pretty funny.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a whole other subject. So, you only have basic mobility and capability to deal with pain. How do you like live your life with that?
Steven Kotler
It’s really funny because people ask me that all the time. And I’m 50, I still spend, you know, I still ski about 50 days a year, I still chase professional athletes around mountains, I mountain bike another 30 days a year. I’m really active. I have almost no pain. And I credit a lot of it to Ashtanga yoga. I mean, I’ve lived through ways, I’ve done a lot of stuff but I found that as long as I continue to do Ashtanga yoga I have almost no pain.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, that’s a little bonus tip we weren’t expecting. Thank you. Cool. Well, now can you share with us a little bit, what’s the Flow Genome Project about and your research there?
Steven Kotler
Absolutely. So, at the Flow Genome Project we study ultimate human performance, right? We study what does it take to be your best where it matters most. And we’re a research and training organization. And on the training side we work with everybody from kind of the US Special Forces, the Navy Seals and such, through kind of elite action adventure sports athletes and like professional athletes to companies like Google or Ameritrade, we spend a lot of time on Wall Street to average individuals.
And on the research side, we’re the largest, I think the largest, open source research project into ultimate human performance in the world. And kind of at the heart of all the work we do is the state of consciousness known to researchers as flow. So, you may know flow by other names. We call it when we’re in higher, being in the zone or being on conscious, flow is the technical term. And it’s defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.
And, most specifically, it refers to any of those moments kind of wrapped attention and total absorption. When you’re so focused on the task and have everything else just vanishes. Actually awareness will emerge, your sense of self disappear, time will pass strangely, it’ll slow down or it’ll speed up, and throughout all aspects of performance – mental and physical – go through the roof. So, flow is sort of the source code, the signature of ultimate human performance, and pretty much any domain you study, and so that’s at the heart of the work we do.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s so good. So, now you’re bringing me back to memories of reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, I think, was the subtitle. And so, I remember a chart that stayed with me forever with regard to one of the keys to getting into flow is that the task is not too easy, then you’re just bored, and the task is not too hard, then you’re just overwhelmed and stressed, but that the task is just right with regard to having a bit of challenge that requires a little more attention, and focus, and absorption in order for you to execute it.
Now, in your most recent research, does that hold true? And what are the most kind of essential other core ingredients to reaching that flow as often as possible?
Steven Kotler
So, you are absolutely correct, you’re talking about what’s known as the challenge skills balance.
Pete Mockaitis
All right.
Steven Kotler
And you are absolutely correct in your description. Emotionally we say flow shows up not on but very near the midpoint between boredom, not enough stimulation or not paying attention, and anxiety while way too much, right? In between is this sweet spot of what’s called the flow channel, or if you speak physiology, it’s the Yerkes-Dodson curve. Nonetheless that is still, so what we were talking about is a flow trigger, a pre-condition that leads to more flow.
When Csikszentmihalyi did his original work, these weren’t really well identified. It’s 20 years later and we now know there are 20 different triggers for flow. There are probably way more but we’ve identified 20 triggers for flow, 10 that produce individual flow with you and I would be like low in a flow state. And then there’s shared collective version of flow state known as group flow, that it shows up very commonly at work.
If you’ve ever taken part in a great brainstorming session, or you’ve sung at a church choir, or played in the band, or seen a fourth quarter comeback in football, or if you happen to see what the Patriots did to the Falcons last year in the fourth quarter – perfect example of what group flow looks like.
So, we got 10 triggers on each side, and the challenge skills balance is obviously, one of them is actually – it’s funny that you remember it, it’s a good one to remember – it’s often called the golden rule of flow. A lot of people thought about as the most important of flow triggers.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so it’s the only one I know, and you got 19 more for us. So, how would you like to tackle this? In terms of I’m interested in the ones that are the most powerful, the most easily accessed by the greatest number of people. That’s probably the great magnitude right there.
Steven Kotler
Yeah, so let me give you a quick-and-dirty overview of some of this stuff.
Pete Mockaitis
All right.
Steven Kotler
So, the first thing you got to know is the most obvious, is that flow follows focus, right? The state only shows up when all our attention is focused on the right here right now, so that’s what these triggers really do. They drive attention into the present moment.
Pete Mockaitis
Now, if I could hit that, when we say flow follows focus, a corollary to that then is that you focus first and then flow comes as opposed to you hope that flow shows up and then you’re able to focus. Is that fair?
Steven Kotler
Okay. So, when we work with organizations, the first thing I always tell people is if they can’t hang a sign on their door that says, “Bleep off, I’m flowing,” they’re in trouble. And the reason is you need intense focus and uninterrupted concentration for flow. And the research actually shows 90- to 120-minute blocks of uninterrupted concentration are the best, and that if you’re doing something really creative you may need to stretch that out even up to like four hour blocks a couple times a week.
So, if you are running an organization or working in an organization where the – which is very, very typical these days – messages have to be responded due in 15 minutes, an email within an hour, those are horrific working conditions, terrible working conditions because you are literally blocking the very state of consciousness, the very kind of focus you need to perform at your best.
And let me just put some numbers around the boost you get from flow. I can go into the research, behind all this stuff that you won’t, but you have to understand the upside we’re talking about is McKinsey did a 10-year study, if a topic that’s good, it was reported being 500% more productive in a flow. It’s a huge boost.
Research done by Milo organization, done at Harvard, done at bunch of other places, have found that creativity spikes 400% to 700% when in flow. Research done by the Department of Defense found that learning goes up 470% in flow, so these are huge, huge spikes in cognitive performance. So, it’s really worth kind of trying to alter your working conditions to produce them because the benefits are significant.
Pete Mockaitis
You know, that is so striking. I got to speak up on behalf of any skeptics in the audience, like, “Whoa, how are they measuring a 500% bump in productivity or creativity or learning?” Do you have a sense for the score?
Steven Kotler
Yeah, so they’re measuring in lots of different ways. And it’s funny, because we’re relaunching that. We want a better look at the productivity so we’re relaunching a flow in business success. I think it’s February with Deloitte to take a better look at it. So, for example, learning is a really easy one that I can speak to. They basically take – they were working with people from the military snipers. The military knows how long it takes to train a sniper up for performance, right? There’s really clear records on that.
So, they were working with a team at the Advanced Brain Monitoring in Carlsbad, California, so one of the other thing that’s starting to happen now is that all the stuff that we’re talking about are psychological hacks, but we’re starting to get technological with this. We understand the neuroscience of flow, we understand what’s going on under the hood, and we can steer people using technology toward flow states, so that’s what they did.
They used EEG technology, they recorded expert brain waves, expert archers’ brain waves in flow shooting at a target, then they used that and used neuro feedback with novice marksmen to train them up until they shot at an expert level using their own feedbacks, so trying to get their brain waves into the same state so the flow the experts were in.
But if you search, by the way, Chris Berka, Advanced Brain Monitoring Head, you will find her TED Talk on this work and you actually can see video, and I think it literally took like two days to train people up to shoot like experts. It was frightening.
Pete Mockaitis
That is so wild. Can I get my hands on a neuro feedback machine?
Steven Kotler
Of course, you can. There’s everything from like super friendly easy like places to start like the MUSE headset, all the way up to some really crazy stuff. The Transformative Tech Market which is what this all sits in is exploding right now. I mean, all kinds, there’s a revolution going on right now in consciousness. And a lot of it, there’s a really good reason for this which is one of the things that we’ve discovered is that there are certain skills that are absolutely critical to thrive in the 21st century, and the list vary but accelerated learning is on most lists, creativity tops everybody’s list, cooperation, collaboration, communication. And we’re horrible at training up these skills.
Creativity is a really funny one. We got to take part in the Red Bull Creativity Project, it’s the largest meta analyses of creativity ever conducted, like 30,000 studies reviewed. And they learned on the end two things. One, creativity is the most important thing that we need to thrive in the current century, and we suck at training people to be more creative. And the reason is we keep trying to train up skillsets, and what we really need to be doing is training up states of mind, right?
All of these so-called skills are amplified by altering our consciousness. That’s how we’re wired to do this. That’s what the biology tells us, so we’re just now starting to figure that stuff out, but it’s spreading really quickly. And the Transformative Tech Movement is helping it spread.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s so cool. Now, in your book Stealing Fire you sort of lay out kind of four sets of forces, and technology is one of them. And so, why don’t we round that one out and then you can share with us some of the triggers that fall into the other three categories.
Steven Kotler
For sure. So, what we’re basically trying to figure out, what was driving all this acceleration in this whole field, right? Like why was it exploding? Why are we seeing really weird things like 44% of American companies rolling out mindfulness training programs? Yoga is now over a billion-dollar industry. Everyone micro-dosing with psychedelics is on the cover of The Economist. Really strange things are going on in this world right now and we want to know what was driving it.
What we’re seeing is that four forces are all essentially accelerating exponentially, right? They’re moving very, very, very, very quickly and they’re driving us forward, and their psychology, neurobiology, technology and pharmacology. And the thinking with psychology and neurobiology, since what we’re talking about is kind of altered states of consciousness here, we now have the tools to kind of map and measure what’s going on in our brains and our bodies when we’re experiencing the inexplicable.
Pharmacology is giving us access to these states nearly on demand, and technology is also giving us access to those states nearly on demand but they’re also taking it wild, right? So, all four of these forces are kind of spreading these things out. And we did a calculation, so we called it the altered states economy. And we, basically, looked at how much time and money and effort people spent chasing peak states of consciousness like flow, and we looked at it globally and we looked at a lot of different categories, adding things up.
And I’ll give you a more detailed breakdown if you wanted. But we came up, the number we came up which was $4 trillion, it’s like 1/16th of the global economy is spent chasing these kind of states. And some of that is really sloppy, right? Some of this is not a healthy approach to these kinds of things, but a lot of it is, and it’s interesting and growing.
Pete Mockaitis
Yes, okay. Well, so then, let’s get into it. So, what are some things that we can do here, now, today to tap into some extra flow?
Steven Kotler
So, let’s just walk through a handful of the triggers and I’m going to talk about. So, there are a bunch of triggers and a bunch of different categories, but there’s three triggers in the psychological category, and you talked about one of them already which is the challenge-skills balance. So, that is unbelievably critical, of course.
Two other ones, immediate feedback is another flow trigger. And so, for example, I studied action of action adventure sports athletes who are very good at getting into flow, and one of the reasons is when you’re performing in the mountains, on the oceans, whatever, it’s a living environment. You’re getting immediate feedback, right? You either set your ski edge on the top of that slide, a face that slide to the bottom.
Well, the same is true everywhere. And the reason this is important, flow follows focus, so if you have immediate feedback you don’t have to pull your attention out of the present moment to course correct. You don’t have to wonder, “Am I doing a good job?” You know because the feedback is immediate. So, what this looks like organizationally is interesting.
And so, if you work for an organization or run an organization where you’re getting quarterly feedback or quarterly yearly progress reports or that kind of stuff, well, that sucks. That’s not enough feedback to stay at all in flow. It’s terrible. So, where this works really well, companies that have kind of an agile methodology if you’re in the software business where there’s lots of rapid experimentation, small experiments, that’s really good. You’re getting lots of feedback that way.
I’ll tell you, so I’m a writer, and book editors are sort of editor in name alone these days. They’re so busy and the market is so taxed, they’re very talented, but they don’t do a ton of editing. So, I can’t write a book and have an editor weigh in three times and that’s it, like that doesn’t work for me. So, I have a guy in my staff who reads everything I write about twice a week for feedback.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay.
Steven Kotler
And there’s something, like you can even take it one step further and figure out. So, I figured out in my writing that when I tend to believe that when I make errors, my writing is either arrogant, boring or confusing, so that’s really what’s he’s looking for. Is my writing arrogant, boring or confusing? And those three errors are tied to like I know why I make each of those errors. I just happen to make them all the time. That’s what I call the minimal feedback for flow.
And you can kind of figure this out for yourself with whatever your main task is, but what I tell people is that you can’t afford to hire somebody to give you that kind of feedback. Find a feedback buddy. Find somebody you can work with where you can get feedback from them all the time and speed up those feedback loops. That’s really helpful.
Pete Mockaitis
Now, so when you say the minimal feedback piece, you’re saying, “Okay. Hey, colleague, I don’t need you to masterfully critic it to perfection, but what I do need for you to do is make sure I’m not committing these three common errors that we can nip in the bud rather quickly.”
Steven Kotler
Yup, exactly. And, by the way, so this is not my exercise. This is Josh Waitzkin’s exercise but I kind of love it. One of the ways to dig out what those errors are is to ask yourself, “What did I believe three months ago that I know is not true today?” And ask yourself why did you make that error. What was missing in your logic?
And do this, obviously, like on your core tasks wherever you want the most feedback, so focus on that. And ask yourself, “With this task I’m on, what do I know now that I didn’t know then? And why did I make that mistake?” And if you do that repeatedly you’ll start to tease out exactly where your common errors are, where your blind spots are, and what kind of feedback you need.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And what’s the third psychological trigger?
Steven Kotler
Clear goals. And here we’re talking about goal setting in general first, so if you’re interested in hacking motivation, we learned in the ‘70s that setting just a high hard goal, a big goal is enough to boost motivation almost 25% in some cases. So, a huge spike in motivation simply by setting a high hard goal. Now, high hard goals are different than clear goals. Higher goals are these big and more of these things in the future, “I want to go to med school. I want to write a book.” That’s a high hard goal kind of thing, right?
Clear goals, flow follows focus, right? Clear goals mean, “I know what I’m doing right now and I know what I’m doing immediately afterwards, so I don’t have to pull my attention out to steer,” right? So, it’s interesting because clear goals are often really, really, really tiny. So, for example, when I set out, I try to write 700 words a day, right?
And if I’m stuck and the clear goal isn’t working, that’s too big of a goal, I will break it down and I’ll say, “Okay, I need to write 200 words that get at the emotion of this paragraph that I’m trying to get,” and really, really clear goals and I shrink them down.
Where this is really useful kind of for most people, I find, is most professionals. So, one of the things that we know is that most professionals will spend about 5% of their work life in flow without even knowing it. Like, McKinsey figured out that if you increased that 15 percentage points to 20% of your time, overall workplace performance would double.
Just to give you an idea of how imminently trainable this stuff is, three years ago we did a six-week joint learning exercise with Google where we took 80 Googlers, 70 Googlers from across the company, so coders, engineers, people in facilities, people in marketing, PR, you name it we had them, and we trained them out in four flow triggers and four kind of high-performance basics, like really basic stuff, sleep hygiene, didn’t get enough sleep at night, that kind of thing.
And over the course of six weeks they did about an hour’s worth of homework a day sort of spread out. We saw a 35% to 80% boost in flow. In fact, we have a flow fundamentals course, it’s a digitally-delivered six-week course available through the Flow Genome Project website. And we measure pre and post, and we’re seeing measuring seven different characteristics of flow, a 70% increase.
And the point is not that we are secret ninja experts at training people in flow, there are lots of people who do this, we think we’re very good at it, but there are a lot of other people who do it. The point is that this stuff is really easy to train. We just haven’t been paying attention to it. So, clear goals, know what you’re doing, know what you’re going to do next, make a to-do list and when you’re moving from one item to the next mind the gap.
That’s where most people get lost, right? You’ll finish one task and before you go to the next one you will do something that will pull your focus out of the present, like check your social media which is terrible because it produces an emotional reaction, and that’s exactly what you’re trying to avoid. You want the clear goals, “I know what I’m doing now. I know what I’m doing next,” and it works that way. So, that’s really useful.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, when it comes to the gap, I want to make sure we hit this. We talked to other peak performance folks who talk about full engagement and energy and attention and all that. So, before you mentioned some spaces of time such as 90 minutes to 120 minutes or even more, do you have a quick take on sort of rest, rejuvenation in terms of maybe it’s a quick breath or bathroom? Or what sort of counts as rejuvenation without breaking the flow?
Steven Kotler
Some people like a little bit of physical flex exercise, right? They’ll get up every 15 minutes and do three sun salutations which is just fine, that’ll work great. Three sun salutations are a little kind of Pomodoro set of some kind, or I really like – I don’t know if you know what box breathing is. It’s a mindfulness practice that the Navy Seals use.
You can just search box breathing online and learn, it’s very effective as a mindfulness technique. Anybody can learn it. But I can do kind of three cycles of box breathing and it takes maybe 90 seconds to two minutes to do depending on how slowly you’re breathing. And so, if I need to reset between tasks that’s what I’ll do.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Perfect. Got it. So, that’s the psychological triggers. Now how about some neurobiology triggers?
Steven Kotler
Well, so all these triggers are neurobiological.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay.
Steven Kotler
So, they do different things. So, for example, there are three environmental triggers: high consequences, deep environment and a rich environment, and I’ll talk about those in a moment. But most of these triggers drive neurobiologically, they trigger the release of norepinephrine and dopamine or both. These are performance-enhancing chemicals, they do a lot of different things in the brain and the body, but they’re also focusing chemicals so that’s why they’re so important here.
Some of the other things, so clear goals doesn’t appear to drive norepinephrine and dopamine but what it does appear to do is lower cortisol levels and keep the brain waves out of high beta and down in the alpha beta range which is where flow is. So, there’s different things underneath different triggers.
And let me just be really clear, there’s so much more research that need to be done here that everything I’m saying is true as far as we know but there’s a big but question mark after some of these stuff on triggers because it’s just really new information.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay.
Steven Kotler
So, let’s go back to the other triggers. So, for example, a rich environment means lots of novelty, complexity and unpredictability in the environment. And I’ll give you the common example is, again, back at adventure sports for athletes, right? One of the reasons these folks had so much flow is they perform in living environments, right?
. . . in a minute-by-minute basis, the waves are always changing if you’re out in the ocean, so there’s lots of novelty, lots of complexity, lots of unpredictability. Those are all three things that the brain loves. It produces huge amounts of dopamine, drives a lot of focus, slides you right into flow.
You can also get at those architecturally, and my favorite example is Steve Jobs. So, when Steve Jobs was kind of redesigning Pixar he wanted more creativity in the building, he wanted more flow in the building, and he thought the problem was there wasn’t enough novelty, complexity and unpredictability because the staff was balkanized, right?
The producers were stagnant talking to producers, and the marketing people stay and talk to marketing people, and the cell animators stay and talk to the cell animators, and nobody was bumping into each other and so there’s no random spark of ideas. Not enough novelty, complexity and not enough creativity as a result.
So, when he redesigned Pixar he famously put a giant atrium in the center of the complex, and he put the only meeting rooms, message rooms, cafeteria and the only bathrooms in the entire building right off the atrium. You had to walk through the atrium to get to any of them.
So, what happened was people started bumping into each other and they started getting into random conversations, and suddenly novelty, complexity and unpredictability massively increased. You got a whole lot more dopamine flow between people, you got these little moments of brute flow, huge spikes in creativity and all those off spurts.
Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, yes. Cool. And so, what about the high consequences?
Steven Kotler
High consequences, this is obvious, right? Flow follows focus and consequences catch our attention, right? So, the obvious is physical risks. Again, action adventure sports athletes, lots of physical risks. But it’s interesting, we noticed that emotional risk, intellectual risk, creative risk, social risk all work really, really well. Social risk is a great example.
You would think from evolutionary perspective that like the number one fear in the world is something like getting eaten by a grizzly bear, but it’s not. It’s speaking in public, right? And the reason is your brain can’t actually tell the difference between social fear and physical fear. They’re processed by the exact same structures which makes no sense at all until you realized, you go back 300 years ago, and before if you got kicked out of your tribe, if you got exiled you couldn’t survive. Nobody could live on their own, so it was a capital crime, and so the brain treats it like a capital crime.
So, social risk is a really kind of great way to trigger flow as well, so risk is really useful. And once again, what does this look like organizationally or in your daily life? And I always said that like to play with the risk trigger, the companies you want to work for, the environment you want to design, something with that Silicon Valley fail-faster fail-forward motto. And you need the space to fail because you need the space to take risks. Without risks there’s not enough energy in the system to really drive flow.
So, again, this is where agile methodology makes a lot of sense, rapid experimentation makes a lot of sense, skunk works make a lot of sense if you’re trying to drive flow in innovation.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And now can you share some of the pharmacology triggers?
Steven Kotler
Advances in pharmacology are more kind of in the psychedelic realm and that’s slightly different from flow but what the research is showing – and this is sort of one of the things we talk about in Stealing Fire – is that in the neurobiological changes that show up in flow are not that different from the changes that show up in meditation or during psychedelic experiences or during so-called mystic experiences, trans states or contemplative states.
All these things are states of awe for that matter. All these things share a very similar underlying neurobiological signature. And so, what we’re seeing in neurobiology is kind of psychedelic research, is going gangbusters, right? I mean, we’re seeing absolutely amazing work being done in PTSD and trauma and anxiety. And the point here and where this gets interesting and probably let me just give you a couple examples to answer your question because it’s a long way around but it’s worth understanding.
So, why all this research matters, is we’re starting to get actions. And the best example is work done on posttraumatic stress disorder which is like the extreme end of the anxiety disorder spectrum. And pharmacologically we’ve learned back in the early 2000s through work done by Dr. Michael Mithoefer and the research came at MAPS that one to three doses of MDMAs – so, MDMA is sort of the pharmacological name for the street drug Ecstasy or Molly, whatever you call it. It’s an empath-delic type of psychedelic, it increases empathy.
But they found that one to three rounds of MDMA therapy, so that’s MDMA administered in a clinical setting with psychiatrists there and like eight hours of talk therapy, was enough to completely cure or significantly reduce symptoms of PTSD in victims of child abuse, sexual abuse and solders returning from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it’s been about five years since that original study was done, six years at this point, and these people are still in remission, so that’s neat, right?
Then they redid that experiment at Camp Pendleton with a thousand soldiers, and this time they were like, “Okay, so psychedelics aren’t for everybody. Let’s use surfing,” which is a known trigger for flow states for a lot of reasons that we’ve been talking about, right? So, they used surfing and talk therapy, and they redid the whole thing, and they found that after five weeks of surfing and flow states and talk therapy they saw a significant reduction or a complete disappearance of PTSD.
Then they redid the study with meditation, a mantra meditation system, I believe. And they found that four weeks of daily meditation, 20 minutes a day, was enough to produce the same results. So, what all this is telling us is we have options. We have options like we’ve never had before and they’re coming from all directions and the research is accelerating everywhere.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so cool. Well, Steven, tell me is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?
Steven Kotler
The other thing I want to mention, only because it’s new and it goes much deeper into individual ideas, is if you go to the Flow Genome Project Facebook page, which is literally www.facebook.com/flowgenome, every Monday at 5:00 o’clock Eastern Time, I do Monday On The Mind. It’s a half-hour deep dive into, you know, two weeks ago we did a half an hour on clear goals and really how to get into that and how to apply it in every situation, that sort of thing, so that might be interesting to people listening.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Thank you. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?
Steven Kotler
Margaret Atwood, “Everybody I know is an adult. Me, I’m just in disguise.”
Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. And how about a favorite book?
Steven Kotler
There’s a couple of them. How about I give you two?
Pete Mockaitis
Sure.
Steven Kotler
Song of the Dodo by David Quammen which is just amazing. If you really want to understand the environmental crisis this is the most amazing book on that. And my favorite book on consciousness ever is a book called The User Illusion by Tor Nørrentranders which is one of the smartest books ever written about consciousness.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite tool?
Steven Kotler
Well, it’s got to be my skis.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite habit?
Steven Kotler
Oh, I get up a 4:00 a.m. is my favorite habit.
Pete Mockaitis
Now, I have to know, when do you go to sleep?
Steven Kotler
Depends, but early. Somewhere between 8:00 and 10:00 most nights.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a particular nugget that you share in your writing or your speaking and working with folks that seems to really connect and resonate and get them quoting you back to yourself?
Steven Kotler
Well, what I said to you earlier that we keep trying to train up skills and what we really need to be training up is a state of mind seems to be a pretty good mantra for people these days. I hear that back a lot.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn or get in touch, where would you point them?
Steven Kotler
StevenKotler.com, FlowGenomeProject.com.
Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?
Steven Kotler
Yeah. So, this is going back to the challenge skills balance, it’s the one thing we didn’t really cover. And so, you mentioned Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, so a couple of years ago he teamed with a Google mathematician and they did a back-of-the-envelope calculation trying to figure out, with the challenge skills balance, how much greater the challenge should be than your skillset, right? That was the question.
And the number they came up with was 4%. Four percent greater. Now, that was just a guess. We took that number into the Flow Genome Project and said, “Okay, let’s see what we can do with it.” And we’ve been running a number of amateur experiments, and beta tests, and just looking at it deeply for about four years now, and time and time again we’re finding that is exactly the case.
So, here’s the super interesting about this. Four percent is not much, right? You really are just a little bit harder. Now if you’re an underachiever, a little bit of an underachiever, you’re a little shy, you’re a little meeker, you’re a little along those lines, 4% is tricky because it is literally the line where you’re pushing on your comfort zone. You’re stepping outside your comfort zone but you’re right there.
For top performers their problem is the exact opposite. Their problem is they’ll blow by 4% without even noticing, they’ll take on challenges that are 10%, 20%, 40% greater than kind of – and by doing so, they’re locking themselves out of the very state they need to kind of meet those challenges. So, it’s a little bit harder every day.
But the interesting thing is when you spend time around the best of the best, what you really see is what they’ve internalized and what they do so well, is they understand that it’s 4% plus 4% plus 4% day after day, week after week, year after year for a career. That’s how you actually like really do the impossible.
Pete Mockaitis
That is so good. Well, Steven, thank you so much for taking this time and sharing. There’s, boy, a lot to chew on and I’m excited to get some more flow going into my life and work sessions, and I wish you much flow in all that you’re up to.
Steven Kotler
Thanks, man. I appreciate the time.
