Full Transcript for The Science of Doing Your Best Work

You don't really know what you're capable of because you can only find out inside of flow.

I'm curious how you would define flow. Flow is a scientific definition and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the one who came up with that definition, but it's technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best. It refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption where you get so focused on what you're doing.

So focused on the task at hand that everything else just starts to fade away and disappear. All aspects of performance, mental, physical, and emotional will skyrocket. What does a flow state feel like? So this is actually the original work that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did on flow. He went around the world asking people about the times in their life when they felt their best and they performed their best, and he discovered that flow has six core characteristics.

So there's complete concentration on the task at hand. There's a merger of action awareness, a diminishment of our sense of self, time distortion.

We don't feel peak performance on the inside. We feel a sense of control. So a sense of I can control things I can't normally control. That's what it feels like, right? You look at Michael Jordan in a flow state, you see the windmill dunk, and that's what it looks like. But on the inside, it's, wow, that basket looks as big as a Hulu, but I can't miss.

It's a feeling I can control. Finally, the last thing is flow states are autotelic is the technical term that Chik Tachmihi used. It just means euphoric and delicious. Autotelic means an end in itself. So it basically means flow feels so good. We'll go very far out of our way to get more of the experience. If I were to put it, psychologists hate when I do this, but it's the most addictive state on earth, period, right? But those are the six characteristics.

So if you're trying to figure out, am I in flow, my team in flow, those are the six characteristics you're looking for. So many people feel like they're not reaching their potential, like they're capable of doing more, but they don't quite understand that. Is flow that key? Flow is how evolution created optimal performance in the human body.

We've known for a while that the origin story of flow was probably runner's high. And there's a couple other evolutionary stories that go along with it. But there's also some proof, and now there's a little bit more kind of neurobiology to back this up, that flocking behavior and mobbing behavior, which are actually related behaviors in nature are early versions of flow states.

But it's very old. And so it's not just in humans. All social mammals get into flow and some insects, some birds. So this is how we evolve to perform at our best. So if you were seeing any human being performing at their best, chances are flow is involved. Another term that's worth defining is peak performance, because it has connotations.

People think soldiers or athletes. And people, as far as I can tell, this is my definition. It's nothing more or less than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. Go deeper on that. There's nothing sort of beyond our biology. There's no secret, secret to performance. There's just our biology. Neurobiology is mechanism shaped by evolution.

It's the same in all of us. What motivates you is going to be different than what motivates me. But in both me and you, that motivation is going to show up as dopamine. So what we're actually after here is the dopamine. That's the actual energy and focus and drive. And all the words and the terms we can put around it don't matter as much as getting the dopamine, which is actually what matters.

And so I sort of figured if we could get to the level of mechanism, this stuff would get very trainable. And that has been our experience. So at the Flow Research Collective, our flagship training for a lot of years was zero to dangerous. We've 35 ,000 people went through it. So after eight week training, people would see a 73% boost in flow.

I would like to tell you that's because our Kung Fu is that good. It's because this stuff is really trainable. And if you start with the neurobiology, which is the same in all of us, it's trainable because it's built into all of us. So maybe spend a few beats and teach me how to get into flow. Two things to know. First, flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow.

There are 26 to 28 that have been discovered. There's probably way more. That's just what we know so far. And the first thing to know is the simplest flow follows focus. This only shows up on all our retention in the right here, right now on the task at hand. So that's what all the triggers do. They drive focus into the present moment. If you peel back the hood, they do this in a number of different ways.

They can push norepinephrine into our system. They can push dopamine into our system. They can push both together into our system. Or they can lower cognitive load. Cognitive load is all the crap you're trying to think about at any one time. And if I lower cognitive load, your brain instantly repurposes that energy for paying attention. This is why people tell you to clean your desk first before you try to focus on writing or something like that.

What you're actually doing is lowering cognitive load because now it's more organized. Things are in spots and the brain will automatically, it's an efficiency engineer, always wants sort of extra energy for the task at hand. And so that's what happens. You clean your desk and you get more energy because cognitive load has gone down. You can focus better.

So that's what all the triggers do. I always, there's three triggers I start people with, but I also start, I always back up. So there is what, it's known as the primary flow activity. This is whatever you've done since you were a little kid that you just lose yourself in. You're just totally freaking immersed in. And it's in a certain level, which triggers you're most susceptible to.

A little bit of that is probably genetic. A little bit more is early childhood environment. So for me, it's skiing, right? That's my primary flow activity, meaning like 90% of the time I go skiing, I'm going to get into a flow state. Or it's a group flow, the shared collective version of a flow state. Interpersonal flow is two people getting a great conversation and an hour goes by and didn't notice.

It's interpersonal flow. I told you earlier that I worked with the same editor and have for 25 years. And group flow is really like, we're really good at this. We're working together for 25 years. We know exactly sort of how to work with each other. And so invariably, a couple times a week, I'm getting into group flow doing that. My wife, it's walking her dogs in the back country.

My best friend is playing the guitar. Everybody's got their thing. And usually what happens as we become adults is what do you do? Oh, you have responsibility. You got a family, got a job. Put down childish things. And you stop. Your primary flow activity goes away. And it's literally the single worst thing you could do for the following three reasons.

First is that this should be obvious, but flow is a focusing skill. Meditation is a focusing skill. They're different. They're different kinds of focusing. You're doing different things in the brain related, but different. But just like mindfulness is trainable. Flow is trainable. It's a focusing skill. So if I go skiing on Sunday and I'm in flow and I go to work on Tuesday, I'm going to have an easier time getting into flow on Tuesday is the first thing to know there.

The second thing is for reasons that we can get into as we go along, anxiety will block flow in most of us, right? A little bit is good. A little bit sort of primes the brain for focus and attention and alertness and learning. Too much will block flow. And primary flow activity lower resets your nervous system. So it'll calm you down. So primary flow activity on Sunday, go to work on Tuesday and counter like a work problem and your threshold, your anxiety is a little bit lower.

If you're burned out, if you're dealing with burnout, my lab did some work on this, but Karina Pfeiffer's lab really is the one that proved this. But flow overwrites burnout. It'll overwrite PTSD, burnout. We do work now. We're doing a lot of work with veterans on PTSD, addiction, depression, because flow is neuroprotective against those things and can sort of pave over some of them.

But if you're really burnt out, doubling down your primary flow activity is sort of the only way back. But what's cool is the research shows that two to four hours a week is about what it takes on your primary flow activity. So the first place to start if you're training flow is actually the thing that you've done your whole life that you've probably stopped doing, and I will set you back there first.

Because if you get into flow in one thing, it's easier in another thing. The easiest thing to get into flow in is your primary flow activity because it's what you're naturally inclined to do that. The most common flow state on earth, by the way, reading. Oh, interesting. Reading is the most common flow state on earth. What are some common flow triggers? If you're trying to think about flow triggers, one of the easy ways to do it is like if you look at the list, they're all, they look like psychological interventions.

So novelty, complexity, unpredictability, risk are all flow triggers. Whenever we encounter any of those things, you get dopamine, right? In complex situations, the most famous flow trigger is the challenge skills balance. So we said flow follows focus. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set.

So you want to stretch but not snap. A bunch of years ago, decades ago now, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi teamed up with a Google mathematician. They tried to put a number on it just to see if they could put a number on it, and they got 4%. And they never said this was science. They said this was a back of the envelope calculation, meaning when the challenge is 4% greater than your skills, that seems to be the sweet spot.

One of the things I will say is it's right outside your comfort zone. The more you sort of train being just outside your comfort zone, just pushing a little bit, the easier it gets. And the other side of it is if you were to talk about the sweet spot emotionally, you'd say it's between boredom. There's not enough stimulation here. I don't care.

I'm not paying any attention. And anxiety, whoa, way too much. Right in between is the sweet spot, what flow scientists call the flow channel. But if you're a physiologist, you call it the Erks -Dobson curve. It's one of the oldest findings in physiology that there's this sweet spot between challenge and skills. But if you're shy or meek or timid or less skilled at the thing that you're doing, you're going to be just outside your comfort zone.

If you're like a hard -charging entrepreneur, the problem is that 4% is so small that you'll blow by and you'll take on challenges that are 50%, 60% greater than your skills simply because it sort of wakes you up. And so if you're training people on flow, you either have to train them to push a little bit harder or usually with type A types, you've got to back them off and tell them to chunk it down.

Those big, huge overarching goals are great. Motivation science tells us that a good, properly set hard goal gives you an 11% to 22% boost in motivation. So that's amazing, like just for having a well -set goal, but you want to chunk it down so the thing in front of you sits in that sort of 4% sweet spot. What this really tells you is you can only get about 4% better at a time, right? Like that when you're laddering up, it's like 4% gains.

This is the thing that we learned when we tested it. And again, I don't know how accurate this is, but like we saw it again and again, we found if you only stay in that 4% sweet spot. And the reason I like we could do with action sport athletes is we started doing it with downhill down mountain bikers and we measured every feature on the hill.

And that's how we could figure out, okay, this is what you can jump. So this would be 4%. And that's how we did it. That's how we were testing it. And what we discovered is if you stayed in that sweet spot, you never plateaued. You would get more flow and more flow and more flow. And you made way more progress over the course of a season than you did the other way.

How can we mute distractions and get into a flow state? We said earlier flow follows focus, right? All the flow triggers drive attention to the present moment. The most obvious flow trigger is complete concentration. What do I mean by complete concentration? For me, it's writing. So I'll give you a writing example. And I'm going to go writing.

First thing I want to do is get rid of all the distractions. So my smartphone gets turned off because, you know, they modeled it after jackpots, the single most, you know, addictive and distracting technology in the world. And so that gets shut down. Notifications, email. When I used to start this work 20 years ago, average executive I dealt with had like three ways you can interrupt them.

There was cell phone, call them, you could email them, you could message them, you knock on their door, right? The average executive I work with these days has like 17 to 18 different incoming channels. And WhatsApp and messages and Slack and Notion. And it's insane. But do you know how many people shit on me? Like my phone is perpetually in focus.

If you're not my kids, it doesn't get through. That's it. Just my kids. And so like people are like, you're always in focus. I feel like I'm interrupting you. And I'm like, well, you can text. I'm just not going to get your text until I choose. And I, yeah, well, that's the other thing. I tell people, train people. So limit communication channels.

Keep one channel open for emergency. So like your boss or your wife or whatever, one channel for emergency. Get rid of the others. Batch communications. So communications in the morning, the end of the day. The next question is how long should you focus? And here's a really good biological answer because we actually have an answer here. So everybody knows they go through a sleep cycle when they sleep.

And it's roughly 90 to 110 minutes long, which is the REM cycle. You have an awake and alert cycle. It's the exact same length. It's 90 to 110 minutes long. Your brain is biologically designed to focus for 90 minute slots. So I always tell people when we're training them in flow and we're training them how to focus, you know, start by starting, you know, start by like walling yourself off.

And if you can only focus for 10 minutes at a time, start there. If it's 15 minutes, start there. It doesn't matter. Start by starting. But when you start to get better at this, you will find that your brain will naturally move. Like you'll people will be training up and training up and I can buy 20 minutes, 25 minutes. And suddenly they're like, oh, my God, I was 90 minutes.

What happened? Right. And I'm like, what happened is your biology like you're built to do that. And so if you start getting your biology to work for you in this way, you're going to move in that direction naturally. So complete concentration is one of the first flow triggers. You know, you have your primary flow activity. I always say, you know, manicure the space for complete concentration and then use the challenge skills balance to figure out how to tune the task.

So I'll give you a writing example. I write every day. I'm sure you do, too. When I'm starting a book, for me, I like to write about 500 words a day. And so that's that's right in that four percent sweet spot for me because that's so mutable. You have to also tune in on a daily basis for what's your energy level. Right. If I didn't get any sleep last night because my plane was delayed and it was three o 'clock in the morning when we landed and I woke up, you know, and it was starting a book, I wouldn't ask myself to write 500 words.

That would be too hard. I'd do 300 words. That's sort of in that sweet spot. So you can manicure the space for complete concentration and manicure the task with the challenge skills sweet spot. How would you teach somebody with ADHD? Would that be different? A couple of things. I'm not an expert at ADHD, but in my original flow, my first flow company, Ned Hallowell literally coined the term ADHD as a Harvard psychologist, just retired to cemetery.

Marriage is now. Both of us think that ADHD is an evolutionary superpower for because it's it's hyperflow. ADHD, the problem isn't I can't focus. The problem is I can't focus on shit I don't care about, right? And shit I care about, I can lock in and you're not going to find me for months. And I will say I have met very few people at the top of industries, business, athletics, arts, like everybody I know has ADHD.

I think it's an absolute superpower in business and everything else. But here's the first thing that I would say. The first thing you have to know when you're working with ADHD, and this is just another flow trigger. Well, most people don't know this, but autonomy and attention are coupled systems in the brain. So you cannot maximize focus.

If you're not the one driving the bus, you are just not going to care where it goes as much as the driver. Like it's just that simple. So for people who have ADHD, reframing is the tool you want to reach for. So I used to, I'll give you an example again from writing, but we can apply it anywhere, but well, or work. If you have a, if a boss comes to you, says you have a boss, right? And you have ADHD and the boss says, I need you to do X.

And you don't like X. X isn't your thing. And you're pissed. You're going to have a really hard time focusing. But if you, if X is something you want to do, you're locked in three days ago, I know what I'm done. So you have to reframe the task. You have to say, God, you know, 90% of this task is crap. I don't care. 10% of it is going to make me a better salesperson.

And that's something I really care about because it's aligned my purpose and who I think of myself. And right. So that's what matters. Or when I used to get early on in my journalism career, where I was really poor and I would have to take every assignment that could possibly come my way because I needed the money. Not all of them were stuff that I loved.

You know what I mean? No. Do I really want to write 5 ,000 words on data caves? I could think of, you know, better things to do with my time, but I, will I do it if you're going to pay me? Yes, absolutely. And I'll, I'll find the task and be like, okay, I don't like any of this task, but writing this is going to teach me how Wired magazine structures their stories.

And that matters to me. So I will focus on the thing that I want to learn that's aligned with my purpose and sort of that's my gateway in. So if you have ADHD, the first thing you have to do is reframe the task to find the autonomy because you can't marshal attention without it. And with ADHD, this is really a problem where you have to figure out what in the task aligns with who you are, your purpose and your values and all that stuff that will allow you to sort of push through.

You said that's the first thing. What else? Know that you're super distractible. So that's going to manifest in two ways. One, it means distraction management, right? Manicure your space, manicure your environment, all that stuff. The other thing you're super distractible to is as you move into flow, one of the things that happens in flow is you get a shitload of dopamine and norepinephrine.

These chemicals do a ton of things in the brain. One of the things they do is they massively amplify pattern recognition. So when we link two ideas together, right, that little rush of pleasure you get, that's dopamine. So if you've ever done a crossword puzzle, you get an answer, right? That little rush of pleasure, that's dopamine, right? And it shows up when there's pattern recognition.

We actually talk about this as the creative trigger. Flow's creative trigger. It's really just because pattern recognition sits underneath creativity. So you have to manicure the space is the first way, but you have to protect yourself against your own thoughts. Because when you're in flow and you've got more dopamine in your system, there's more pattern recognition.

Creative ideas tend to spiral. One idea will lead to the next idea, lead to the next idea. In flow, tangents are delicious. So with ADHD, it's easier to get distracted and you've got that crazy focus. So you're going to get distracted and then you're going to focus down that rabbit hole and you're going to be gone and you're not going to finish the task at hand.

So you sort of need the discipline to stay focused on what you're doing and just sort of like write down the tendency. We're going to save that for later. So you want to manicure the space on the front end. You sort of want to police your thoughts as you move through it on the back end. And you always want to sort of find your autonomy in the act.

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Your first three videos are free at HeyJeng .com slash TKP. That's H -E -Y -G -E -N dot com slash TKP. Is flow always good? So that's an interesting question. One of the things that's worth pointing out is flow is morally neutral. It's a tool. So soldiers get into flow. So depending on which side of battle you're on, right? Chick set me high pointed out years ago and he was absolutely right that most so -called juvenile delinquency, graffiti art, vandalism, fighting, that sort of stuff.

It's actually bored teenagers who are naturally, your body will naturally see flow. And they're actually tuning the challenge skills balance with your delinquency. They're upping the challenge level in their lives and trying to get into flow rather than this isn't about like misbehaving. It's actually this is flow -based behavior. So flow is just it's neutral, can be used for good or bad and can have good and bad effects, right? Depending.

What do we know for sure? We know it underpins happiness, well -being, overall life satisfaction, meaning and purpose, increases longevity. I mean, we can talk about what cognitive benefits, but these are just like kind of well -being benefits. Those are beneficial. It expands empathy, which I always think is a good thing. It increases environmental awareness, which is our ability to see, perceive and care about the natural world.

I always think that's a good thing. And what's one specific thing everybody listening to this podcast can change today that will increase their performance? So we did this work a while ago. It's written about my book, Now Our Country, which was really an experiment in longevity. But one of the things that we discovered is so I have and I knew Anders Ericsson before he passed.

He was a really nice guy, really liked him. But flow work challenges his 10 ,000 hours, like, right, it does, because it says you can flow. And this is if you go by DARPA's research defense department looked at learning and flow, and they found that you learn 230 percent faster than normal in flow. 230 percent than normal is obviously if it's going to take you 10 ,000 hours, which we all know is a fantasy number.

And that was Malcolm and not Andy Zarek. It's 10 ,000 iterations. And even that, it depends on what domain you're trying to learn, right? But so what we discovered, among many other things, is it's not just flow. So we compared deliberate practice, which is Anders Ericsson, which is doing repetition with incremental improvement, against deliberate play, which is repetition with improvisation, and as learning tools.

And you will actually learn better in very tight domains like mathematics and violins. The stuff that Anders was studying, deliberate practice is great because they're very structured and bounded disciplines. And if you're inside one of those, deliberate practice is effective. If you're outside of a bounded discipline, which is pretty much almost everything else other than like musical instrument, a couple other things, deliberate play outperforms deliberate practice significantly.

And the simple reason is how does learning work? Quick shorthand for learning and memory is the more neurochemicals that show up during experience, the better chance that experience will move from short -term holding to long -term storage. It's what neurochemicals do. They do a lot of different things. One of the things they do is tag experience, important, save for later.

This is why flow is this huge dump of neurochemistry, which is why learning goes through the roof. But quite simply, when we play versus when we repeat the same thing with incremental improvement, we get way more neurochemicals. So deliberate play will outperform deliberate practice. So you ask for one thing that most people can do to increase learning and peak performance.

Be more playful. What are the sources of motivation? If you're trying to amplify human motivation, the way I always explain it, people that we usually I talk about this, people will come to me and they're like, how do you find a purpose? How do I get a purpose? Right. Like, what is my and I said, well, biologically, you can follow the biology.

The way the biology works is curiosity is the foundational motivator. It's a little bit of dopamine. It's a great motivator, but it's just a little bit of dopamine. If you are trying to build towards passion, right, which is this bigger individual motivator, you just want the intersection of multiple curiosities. So this is one of the things when people are trying to find their purpose.

One of the things I do is I say, list 25 things you're curious about and find where they intersect. This used to be a hard thing for people like they would have a hard time doing this and it would take me a really long time. The great thing is we all have LLMs. Those they and they're great at this. Like you can literally use an LL to do this.

But if you can figure out where like one, three or four of your curiosities intersect and start playing there, that's passion. That's a seed kernel of passion because now you've got a lot of different dopamine coming in. When you attach that passion to a cause greater than yourself, that's purpose. The reason we care about purpose from a motivational standpoint is better drugs, right? Passion is dopamine and norepinephrine.

It's really powerful, but purpose is dopamine, norepinephrine, and then all the pro -social neural chemistry that you get when other people are there. So you get serotonin and you get endorphins and you get oxytocin. It's better drugs, right? It's more feel -good drugs. It also seems like there's two fundamental power sources for motivation, if you will, which is one, I have a chip on my shoulder.

I'm moving away from something. And then the other is I'm moving towards something. It's an interesting way of thinking about it. So one of the more famous things that I wrote, it was a newsletter, actually, but I love small letter S spite as a motivator. This is Tom Brady, right? Like with a chip on his shoulder. There's a fortune cookie that's taped to our refrigerator that my wife found, and it says you get great satisfaction out of proving other people wrong.

And almost everything I've done, like I've done because somebody I thought was doing it wrong and it pissed me off. And so I want to fix it. So I love that as a motivator. When is a chip on your shoulder healthy and when is it unhealthy? So Michael Jordan is the example of unhealthy because… Greatest basketball player of all time. Of all time.

And I was born in Chicago. I grew up a Bulls fan. It was like watching Jordan play was amazing. But watching what that chip became after he was out of basketball. Like do you watch interviews with Michael Jordan and think, oh, here's a really happy dude.

I'm thinking he's starting to get a little bit there now. But as a general, that level of spite as a motivator ends up eating you alive. So I think like it's really, really useful. But you sort of got to know when to put it down. That's why I say small s spite. One of the things that I never do is read criticisms of my work, take it personally, and care what my critics say or argue with my critics.

But I know lots of thinkers, lots of really brilliant men and women who somebody said they were wrong. They will like go toe to toe. I'll give you– this happened fairly recently, and it was just– we put out a very– I have a new science article out right now in Frontiers of Neuroscience called The Body Doesn't Keep the Score. And it is a direct rebuttal against Vander Polk, who I think is totally wrong.

And I think that book is very problematic. Some of my co -writers, because people are freaking out, and there's a lot of like podcasters who are trying to– people are trying to argue with us. And I had to– I was like, we're not going to play that game. Like at some point, if, you know, the right person comes to us and says, hey, will you have the conversation? Yes, we'll do that.

But our job is not to like defend our territory against commerce. We took our stand. We made our stay. It's a very well -written article. You can argue with us.

More, right? Like people got mad? Great. Let's go do another study and prove it more, right? And like that's our job. Our job isn't all the rebuttals, and you don't have to sort of do that. Or, you know, I see those writers. And it's amazing because I like– I see really smart people who are amazing contributors to this world. And I can't tell you how much time they're, you know, like flushing down a toilet because they want to argue with their critics.

One thing we haven't talked about with flow is its relationship to learning. So I know Cal Newport argues that flow isn't the optimal learning state because we need a lot of discomfort. I'm curious, what's your reaction to that? One of my pet peeves is people who coin a whole bunch of new language for themselves. One of the reasons flow research was so damn hard, so damn hard, the entire altered state space is everybody wanted to coin a new name, right? Right? Maslow called it peak experiences.

Chick sent me high with flow. Then Phil Jackson, the zone. And so I look at Cal, and I think– and I'm picking a fight here that I don't really need to pick a fight. But like it bugs the shit out of me. I'm like deep work is another word for flow, brother. Like I'm sorry, you've coined a new term. When he says, well, no, you're going to need a lot of struggle for– well, that's because there's a flow cycle.

The front end of a flow state is what is known as struggle. It's a loading phase. Flow is unconscious when we can perform tests without much conscious interference. To perform something unconsciously, we first have to learn it consciously, right? And so that's why there's a– the first front end of flow state is struggle, right? It's all conscious.

It's all thinking. It's– and Cal is exactly correct. And this is Colleen Seifert sort of did some of the original work here. She was the University of Michigan. She's brilliant. But she found that in struggle, the more frustrated you get, the more sort of overloaded your RAM, the better chance you have of a solving the problem later and be of getting into flow.

Well, once that solution shows up, if you're curious about the interviews listening, if you look my name and our big paper on the neural dynamics of intuition, it's called Pathfinding a Neurodynamical Account of Intuition Ran in Nature. We found that this is also true if you want an intuitive breakthrough, like when you're learning a subject, the more frustrated you are, the better chance you will later like intuit the solution.

And this is so this is I'll talk more about flow and learning, but this is like for parents. I think it's one of the most important things that you need to teach kids. And I think it's one of the most important things that all of us need to learn. So I would say if you actually understand peak performance, you find out that a lot of our emotions don't mean what we think they mean.

You know, frustration is a great example. When most people get frustrated, they're learning something they can't learn, they're frustrated, they can't solve them. They think it's a sign they did something wrong. They think it's a sign that they're moving the wrong direction or they should stop or whatever. From the literature, I can tell you it's the it's exactly right.

You have a label on it. Like it still feels like shit. It's still frustrating. But You're Actually Moving In The Exact Right Direction. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. It just doesn't feel very good. So frustration is feedback. Frustration is kind of feedback. All it's telling you is that you've overloaded your working memory. But anyways, frustration is a sign that you're moving in the right direction.

And so, yes, is he right? Like, do you need to struggle for learning? Yes. In fact, you need norepinephrine in your system to learn. Norepinephrine is low levels is curiosity. High levels is anxiety, right? And you cannot learn without a little bit of norepinephrine in your system. It will completely block learning. So he's not wrong, but there's a biological cycle here.

It goes farther than that. And what he's calling deep work is like, as far as I can tell, is flow. And you've just reblanded, you know, something else. And you've just made it harder for people who are trying to study this and get smarter about it. I want to come back to something. Maybe double click on pattern recognition and anticipation, the relationship between those two things.

The brain fundamentally is a prediction engine, right? What the brain is doing at every moment of every day is it's trying to predict what is about to happen, right? And what it wants to do is lower uncertainty, wants to minimize uncertainty, and it wants to know exactly how much energy, right? Because we evolved in an environment where calories are really hard to come by.

So it never wants to waste energy. So it's what's about to happen and how much energy do I need to meet the challenge? That's what the brain is always trying to do. So when I think about when you say anticipation, I'm really just thinking about what we mean by like a prediction engine brain that's always sort of trying to lower uncertainty.

And I also think like if you're trying to understand human behavior, you always have to start there. We use pattern recognition as a flow trigger. So it's another one of flows triggers. And it's really, really, really important. And I'll give you a couple of like sort of really common examples. So one of the things I will always have people I'm working with do is read a minimum of 25 pages a day, usually in a book.

I like, I think books are the best, but because you have to stock the pattern recognition system with ammunition, right? If you're not feeding the pattern recognition system new information, it doesn't have the raw materials to make connections. So one of the ways to start getting more flow in your life is if you start taking in more information.

And I like reading books because they, they're just the densest form of information available on the planet. And you have the best opportunity for stocking the pattern recognition system that way. But that's one of the things I think of when talking about pattern recognition. Again, on the other side, this is something that I train a lot.

I will train different thinking styles, lateral thinking, right? Outside, outside the box thinking, how do you make sort of connections between sort of unrelated things? How does that work? And the brain will, you know, sort of automatically do that. I always say with, we were talking earlier about writing and sort of one of the most common causes of writer's block is not knowing your starts and your endings.

If you know where you're starting, you know where you're ending, the brain is a built, it's a pattern recognition system, right? The brain does pattern recognition at like, this is what neurons do it at most basic level, right? Everything, everything we do is built out of pattern recognition. If you know your starts and your endings, you have a pattern recognition system for the brain.

It will connect them. This is how we do narrative. This is how we do cause and effect. This is how the brain does everything. So with writing, people are, if they're stuck, it's usually because they don't know where they're starting and where they're going because eventually the brain will automatically fill in the middle for you because it's built to do that.

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Can you teach people to think better? If you want to think better, you have to start by reading more. Like, you want to think better, read more. First thing. People ask me how I got my career, how I did anything, and I will flat out tell you I outread the motherfuckers. I just realized very early on I wasn't the brightest guy. I wasn't the best at all that stuff, but I was willing to read three or four or five times the amount as anybody else was willing to read.

So I think, one, if you want to teach somebody to think better, you've got to teach them how to read more. When I say read, I actually mean books. I spend most of my time these days reading textbooks because I think it's the ultimate edge. I love them because literally you have the best people in the world summarizing and putting all their most important stuff into it, and nobody else reads them.

I always talk about this in terms of the ROI on reading. So, for example, if you read a blog of mine or a short article, it's going to take you five to eight minutes, about a thousand words. It's going to take you five to eight minutes to read it. What do you actually get for those thousand words? Well, if I'm writing a blog article, it's two writing sessions, really.

I'm going to write it one day. I may do one phone call, one interview. I'll call a friend. Hey, you're an expert. What do you think? This is the idea. And then I'm going to polish it the next day. So you give me five minutes and you get roughly six hours and maybe one phone call. So two brains on the problem and about six hours for five minutes.

That's not bad ROI. But if you read a book, say Rise of Superman, my books on average are about 70, 72 ,000 words. So you take mostly about six to seven hours reading them. This is just normal reading speed, right? So, okay, cool. You've given me six to seven hours. What's your return on investment? Well, for Rise of Superman, it took me 15 years worth of research to write that book.

There were thousands of conversations. And, you know, so literally you're giving me six or seven hours, but you're getting 15 years of my life and hundreds of other people beating on those ideas. That's amazing ROI. Two ideas that dovetail into this that I want to hear you maybe respond to. One is I have a concept called the learning loop.

Okay. And it's you have an experience. You take that experience. You compress it. So you reflect on it. So you have an experience. You reflect on it. You create a compression. And then you act on that compression. Okay. And when we communicate with other people, we're often communicating the compression. Yeah. And I feel in a lot of cases, it's the illusion of knowledge.

It's like me going home, I pull out a cookbook, I can make that recipe, but if something goes wrong, I have no idea what went wrong, why it went wrong. But the chef who's had the experience, reflected on that experience, and then given me the recipe, which is in fact the compression, they knew exactly what went wrong. There's too much salt, your oven's not the right temperature, you didn't start enough.

They instantly know all of that stuff. And a lot of what we consume is the compression, other people's compression. So in the podcast space, one of the reasons I wanted to do long form is to get away from the compression, at least as reasonably as we can, get away from the compressions, get into the experiences and show the thinking, show the reflection, and then people can come up with their own compressions that they take away from the episode.

In an effort to make it more useful, I'm curious, A, how you would respond to that, B, how I can make the podcast format better for people to take away information they can actually use? One, I think it's a medium is the message kind of thing. So I think you will get, with this kind of thing, better stories, better the human side. Like, there's a lot of advantages, because those things even get compressed in books for a lot of reasons.

So I think the podcast is really, there's certain kinds of things that are very, that is very effective for. When it comes to, like, teaching knowledge, though, I still think there's something about reading. Oh, definitely. It's just better. I also always tell people that, like, you can't read the same books as other people, right? If you read the same books as other people, you think the same thoughts as other people.

And so whenever the whole world is running around talking about a book, like, I'm usually, usually suspicious of that book, but I'm usually curious about what the author read to produce the book, right? Right. That's really interesting to me. I like, I like backtracking that way in terms of sources, how to make the podcast better from an information perspective.

Information density. Density perspective is interesting. To me, it's also about your willing to, a willingness, one's willingness to always sort of ask the extra question. I've been on both sides of the microphone, right? I started out as a journalist.

And there's an urge to sort of get through your questions and get through the interview and sort of do that part of the job. But like every, there's always the next question, right? There's that follow. And so that, like the restraint to like, oh, I'm not going to get through my checklist. I'm going to take the time to ask the next question and the follow up and the follow up, which you've been doing.

So like. But this is why you're the perfect person to talk to with your journal. Like, how do you pull out the best information from people? So this is, how do you interview experts? Yeah. Right. These are my roles. One, I don't go into, like, if I'm being interviewed by somebody or interviewing somebody, I know, I learn everything. Like everything.

I will know your hometown. I remember at one point I had to meet, I can't remember the vodka company. It was the guy with one of the big vodka companies. I was interviewing him. And I found out, like, not only was, did I find out what his hometown was, I found out what the patron saint of his hometown was. And there was a statue, Saint Edwina.

This is the patron saint of ice skating. It's still stuck in my brain. I can't even tell you what town it is. It was in Finland, I want to say. So, like, I'll go into the interview knowing all their work and a lot about them. First question I ask always displays personal knowledge. So, you grew up in so and so. And when you were 10 years old, X happened.

Something that, like, lets you know, I know your history. That's question one. Question two, I'm going to always display domain knowledge about. Not just your, like, I'm going to display knowledge about your work, but I'm going to put it in domain context. So, David Eagleman, science writer, right? So, David, when you wrote Incognito and you presented your information on synesthesia, that's really interesting, but it conflicts with what Helmholtz said back in, blah, blah.

I'll do that kind of thing. So, the first two questions I want to establish, one, I know you. I know you and I know your work and I can speak your language. So, feel free to speak freely.

I will, I'm also always the first person to be like, hey, stop. You're going to have to explain that to me. Like, I'm a four -year -old, right? I've got no, I've got no ego. No shame. No, what I like. I love being the dumb guy in the world. Right? Love being the dumb guy in the room and being able to be like, hey, how did that work? It's about sort of seducing your interviewee into flow, right? What you want is to interpersonal flow.

What you're trying to get here is interpersonal flow. Us to get so lost in the conversation that my filters come down and I'm willing to, you know, that's what, that's sort of what everybody's sort of going for. When you're interviewing experts and suddenly you're like, oh my God, you know my history and you speak my language? You're one of us.

I can talk to you, right? It's a big deal. I want to switch gears just a little bit. Josh Widskin says he hunts for his own thinking errors. Is that like the meta skill? Why is he so effective at learning? I love Josh. I think he's a genius about this stuff. I don't know if this is an answer. So I'm going to fumble around for a little while.

But I will tell you that the areas where Josh learned how to learn first as a chess player and then as a martial artist, especially in Tai Chi, which is a sort of a slower, more meditative stuff. When you make errors in thinking.

In chess, you're going to lose. And in Tai Chi push like he's going to get thrown out of the ring, right? Because he was doing competitive. The martial version of Tai Chi and you get pushed out of the ring. That's how you lose in that version. And so his thinking errors were very visible to like the errors of thinking have consequences that are that were right in his face.

And I think something like that, even like me learning to think as a journalist, right? When I got something wrong, I would get fired or I wouldn't get hired again. You know what I mean? So I think to develop the meta skills, one, like I think the consequences sort of help a little bit to help you think about thinking. I also think I'm a longtime meditator.

Josh is a longtime meditator. And when you start getting that separation between emotion and feeling, right? Because emotions surface first and they're automatic and feelings come second. And they feel automatic and they feel like. But you know, like if you can get into the gap between feeling emotion and feeling, you start to figure out, oh, wait a minute.

That feeling is a frame. It's not exactly trustworthy. It's different. There's two things going on here. And the minute that feeling shows up, it locks me into a meaning. And so when you start doing that work and you start noticing there's like there's a difference there. I think all these things are very helpful sort of on the way to metacognition.

I want to tie that back to Josh for a second. So it seems like there's a couple of things. I'm going to say how I'm hearing what you're saying and maybe you can respond to this. So it sounds like a lot of the conditions Josh was using were the same conditions we need for intuition. So rapid feedback, a lot of iterations and a relatively unchanging environment.

You know, you're confined in what's happening. And then I heard, but you didn't say, or maybe I inferred from my past knowledge of Josh that he was okay being uncomfortable, which means he was okay looking like a fool and being a beginner. And he didn't have an image or something he had to maintain and he was okay making mistakes and then getting the feedback from those mistakes.

That's interesting. I wasn't thinking about that. That is obviously true. I think anybody who's good at learning doesn't like– I don't like being bad in public. So I try very hard– like even with– when I ski, I try to get as far away from the chairlift. Like I will– I want to iterate in the woods out of sight. I think Josh was a little– like when Josh was transitioning from Tai Chi and martial arts, Gracie Jiu -Jitsu at that point and moving into surfing and pedalboarding which is where he is right now, he left New York and went down to Costa Rica, right, where he doesn't really know anybody he got.

And some of it was access to waves and I got that but I think some of that it was also like, let me get away from everybody I know so I can like be really bad and it doesn't matter. So I have a theory on how people learn just on this notion. I think the best people in the world often learn in what I call the dark hours. Nobody's watching them.

There's no boss. It doesn't matter what your field is. It's how you hone your craft. You play. You're there after 5 p .m. It's 10 o 'clock at night. You're playing around with an Excel spreadsheet or you're riding a wave or you're doing whatever. And nobody's watching you. And in those moments, you can fail because there's no consequences.

There's no boss directing you. And you're playing and you're learning. And that sort of ties into what you were saying with skiing and how you– yeah, I want to do this in the back where nobody can see me. I think about this slightly different from just saying when I– I always talk about the importance of non -time. I get up and start my writing day about 3, 30, 4 o 'clock every day.

And one of the reasons is nobody bugs me. Nobody owns 4 a .m. to 7 a .m. is non -time. It doesn't belong to anybody. And I– you know, this is an old habit from– I used to live on the West Coast and I was like– I was the West Coast reporter for a lot of East Coast publications. And we were all young and hungry. And so like my friends would– my editors would show up at like 8 o 'clock in the morning.

They would get to work early. And it's 5 o 'clock back on the West Coast and they would start to call me. So I knew I had to get my work done, like my books written before the phone started ringing because I was so poor. Like the minute they called, what do you need? How high? I'll jump, right? Like what do you need? I'll go do it. So it was an instant yes and I knew this.

So I had to like start getting up earlier and earlier and earlier. And I started to realize exactly what you did is– now I love it because sometimes in my job, I'm sure in your job too, there are days I got to spend an hour or two hours on a sentence. And if you're asking me to spend two hours on a sentence at 9 a .m. in normal business hours when I got to like run my company, you're crazy.

I cannot do it. And it's certainly not playful, right? And really what you want when you're stuck writing is exactly that. You have to start playing with the language to like get that break. You have to come at it from weird angles and do all that stuff. And you can only do that with like that non -time or your dark hours.

Yes, that's sort of how I think about it. One of the things we have in common is that we both had Lyme. Tell me about your story. It's sort of the second half of my entrance into flow science comes out of this. I had this crazy sort of year of– it's the last year of where I was a journalist. I had a bunch of badass assignments. I went to Africa and lived on the side of a river in Madagascar for a couple of months.

I was part of the first National Geographic sand surfing expedition into the Sahara. Then I did the first biotic survey ever in a slot canyon. It was like all this man stuff. And then I went to a wedding, a friend's wedding in Long Island and went for a walk in the Arboretum because I'm shy around people I don't know. And he was his friends and I didn't know anybody.

And I got bit by a tick at a wedding in Long Island. But I lost– I spent three years in bed. I was one of the first cases in California, so they had no idea what was on me. And it was– nobody could fix me. So I was on drugs to my stomach lining. I was on doxycycline until my stomach lining started bleeding out. And they were like, we don't know if you're ever going to get better.

We're done with you. We can't do anything more for you basically. It's so interesting because doxycycline is the treatment. I know it's the drug. But they kept me on it for so long that like now they'll keep you– it's a month or two months. They kept me on it for a year and a half, like which was insane. So they– it did a lot of bad stuff to me.

The story I always tell is I was functional like 10% of the time. I don't know how sick you got, but I couldn't– I was really sick. Yeah, my brain stopped working. My short -term memory was gone, my long -term memory, all of it. And I couldn't, you know, walk across a room. And after– I was going to kill myself. I had sleeping pills. I had booze.

I had a plan. It was just– it was like when, not if. And I was in L .A. at the time and a friend of mine showed up at my doorstep and demanded that we go surfing. And I was laughing. I was like, Andrew, I can't walk across a room. I'm not going surfing. And she would not leave my apartment and wouldn't leave and wouldn't leave and wouldn't leave and after like three hours.

And you know how irritable you are with Lyme, right? You have no reserves. And she really just– it didn't matter what I said to her. She was not leaving. And after three hours, I was like, I give up. Let's just go surfing today. What is the worst that can happen? I'm going to kill myself anyway, right? So she took me to the Pacific. They gave me a giant board, right? And surfing the bigger board, the easier it is to surf.

And it was summer. It was a mellow, warm day. And people had to like take me by the elbows and lead me out to the break. And I was on my board like less than 30 seconds and a wave came. And I think I took literally all the energy I had in the world and popped my feet. And I had no intention. Like when we went surfing, I was like, I'm going to sit out in the sun for an hour and then we're going to go home.

I'm not going to surf. That would be insane and impossible. And I popped up into a dimension I didn't even know existed. I time slowed to an absolute crawl. And I've been in flow states before, but not a full blown macro flow state. I started to have an out -of -body experience and a bunch of other really crazy things happened. And it felt it was amazing because the best part about it is like my head was clear.

I could surf. The pain was gone. And it was amazing. I caught four more waves that day and I was done. And they drove me home and they put me into bed. And I didn't move for 14 days. People had to bring me food because I couldn't even get to my kitchen. I was destroyed from it. And on the 15th day, I could walk again. I had a neighbor who was a pro surfer, a foreign pro surfer, and I didn't even know him.

And I just like knocked on his door and I said, hey, can you drive me to the beach? And I went surfing again. And over the course of like six months, I went from about 10% functional to about 80% functional. And the only thing I was doing was surfing and coming back being destroyed. And slowly over time, I got healthier and healthier. And I was having these wild, altered state experiences in the waves.

And Lyme, as you know, is only fatal if it gets into your brain. And I'm a hardcore science guy. I'm a rational materialist. I'm having basic quasi -spiritual experiences in the waves. And I think, okay, I might be feeling better, but it's got to be an illusion. The disease is in my brain and I'm clearly dying. So I lit out on a giant quest to figure out what the hell happened to me.

And I had seen flow sort of work earlier in my career with athletes and getting them sort of from zero to superhero. But I didn't exactly know it was flow. We didn't quite know what was going on. It was hard to tell what was flow, what was a quote -unquote spiritual experience. The literature was very confusing. The science wasn't there yet.

The neurobiology wasn't done yet. So it was really hard to figure that out. But I, you know, quickly figured out that these states have a name. And from a neuroimmunology perspective, Herb Benson, who sort of at Harvard, who's the cardiologist, who's famous for the relaxation response, he actually mapped the original neurochemistry of the flow cycle.

Flow is a four -stage cycle. It's not a light switch experience. And he mapped it. And he looked at healing. And he has said in his book, The Breakout Principle, that he thinks flow is responsible for most cases of spontaneous healing. And I think, by the way, that's a massive overstatement, but not for an autoimmune condition. And here's why.

As we transition into a flow state, there's a global release of nitric oxide, right? It's a gas -stickling molecule. You go to the gym. And when your lungs open up after about 20 minutes, it gets quiet upstairs, that's nitric oxide. And it pushes stress hormones out of your system. In flow, when you transition into flow, it's a huge nitric oxide release.

So the stress hormones are good stuff in your system. And they're replaced by performance -enhancing feel -good neurochemistry. The biggest problem over time with an autoimmune condition is you no longer know where homeostasis is. Your body can't find baseline because it's always bouncing it. So a lot of that is because your nervous system doesn't know where's normal.

So by moving into flow and just having the stress hormones pushed out of your system resets the nervous system to baseline. So the system can sort of the prediction engine brain can start making more accurate predictions again. It brings back agency. It does a whole lot of stuff psychologically and emotionally and physically. And the neurochemistry of flow, dopamine and norepinephrine and serotonin and andamine, all those things boost the immune system.

They don't just sort of reset the nervous system and feel good. They're immune system boosters. This is why flow can often be really healing from especially from autoimmune conditions. And this is now much more well -established. Back in the 90s, you know, the mind -body connection was still suspicious right back in the 90s. Ellen Langer hadn't done her work at Harvard yet and all this stuff that sort of like smoothed that over hadn't happened yet.

How long did it take you to feel normal again? I was sick for three years. The surfing to like 80% functionality, which is what got me to was about a year. And then it took six more years till I was sort of back till normal. I lost like 30 or 40 pounds. I was 170 pounds when I started and I was 129 pounds when I finished with Lyme disease.

I still can't get my weight above 160 like this. Like I can't get, I can't get back. I lost about an inch of height too. I was done. I was shorter. Oh, wow. I was lighter. I thought I had a bad case of Lyme, but that takes. What happened to you? I just woke up one morning and started drinking coffee and the left side of my face was completely paralyzed.

And that was the start. And I had no idea. So I like called my mom and I was like, can you come watch the kids? I got to go to the hospital. And I show up at my doctor's office and they were like, oh my God, we think you're having a heart attack. So they brought me in, saw the doctor. She's like, yeah, I think you're having a heart attack.

And I'm like, well, rationally speaking, that doesn't make a ton of sense, right? Like healthy, no family history.

Out of all the things, like what else could it be? And, you know, she's like, you need to go to Emerge like right now. And I show up at Emerge. They're like, yeah, you know, I have a heart attack. And then, you know, six hours later, because this is Canada, I see a doctor and they give me all these tests. And I was like, oh, you know, I was talking to some neurologist while I was waiting.

And he's like, oh, you were playing Dr. Google over here. And I was like, well, they said that, you know, in a healthy, you know, male at my age, test for these four things. And that will probably cover 80% of what would cause it. And he's like, here's some Pregnazone, go home. If your family doctor thinks you need it, she can order the test.

And over the next two weeks, I started to gradually lose almost all functionality. Like I couldn't stand still at one point. Like if I stood still for more than three seconds, the back of my knees felt like somebody had stabbed them. I'd be lying on the floor crying. And then, you know, after that, my I had locked up, I couldn't open my mouth.

And so like my whole body was just shutting down. But luckily, a friend saved me. It's like, I told her about it. She's like, this feels like Lyme. She wrote me a prescription, doxycycline. And within three days, I like I just started feeling improvement. And she gave me the requisition to get tested for for Lyme. And I got tested for it.

It turns out I tested positive. My family doctor called me the day after I got my test results, because it takes seven days in Ontario to get a Lyme test result, which is insane in and of itself, given what it does to your body and how destructive it is and how prevalent it is. And so she calls me and she's like, I finally agreed to give you a requisition, you know, because you're just arguing with if you go if you open up West to Jesus, which is the book I wrote where I tell the sort of the story we just walked through.

I don't really write about much about the Lyme. It just sort of kicks off the book and it's there a little bit. But there's a paragraph where I list all the diseases they thought I had before they would test me for Lyme. Interesting. It's literally a paragraph. Such a simple test. They refused. There's first the disease and then there's the medical establishment and what it's like to deal with a long term illness and the medical establishment.

You have to advocate for yourself. And it's, I don't know, it was eye opening for me in so many ways. But luckily, we're both fully recovered and healthy today. So we always end these interviews sort of with a similar question or theme. But I have two questions for you. When are you most happy? When I'm skiing or when I'm riding. And what is success for you? It's always been the same thing, right? It's like, I get to like, put words together in a straight line for a living.

It's the most mad. Like, I can't believe people pay me for it. And now I get to like, put words together in a straight line, often based on the like science experiments that me and my friends get to run. I, are you kidding? Like, are you crazy? I would have done all this shit for free. In fact, I was doing it for free for a very long time, right? So I think of it that way.

I'm also, I flat out tell you, it's one of the reasons I get along so well with the action sport athletes is I am ferociously competitive. I don't take it very seriously. But if you came to me, I will flat out tell you, I want to be the greatest writer in the history of the universe. I know that's not a specific title, but I still want that title, right? Like I'm that ferociously competitive.

The coolest thing about flow, right? And performance is that it's emergent. You don't really know what you're capable of because you can only find out inside a flow and you get into a flow state and you push your skills to their, to their edge. And then, you know, you get into another and you push it and push it and push it. And so when I think of what success is, it's always, I don't like, it's not a destination.

It's a way of living. And to me, the way of living is one, I'm doing things that are like core to me and dearly authentic and where I can be very effective and useful. I get to keep following my curiosity out and it doesn't stop. That's how I think about it.

I'm doing things that are like core to me. And I'm doing things that are like core to me. And I'm doing things that are like core to me. And I'm doing things that are like core to me. And I'm doing things that are like core to me. And I'm doing things that are like core to me. And I'm doing things that are like core to me. And I'm doing things that are like core to me.

And I'm doing things that are like core to me. And I'm doing things that are like core to me. And I'm doing things that are like core to me.