Steven Kotler on The Art of Impossible

Mexico to interview Father Richard Rore. In his office, there was a quote posted that struck me and has stayed with me ever since. Life doesn't have to be perfect to be wonderful. But the good news is there is so much that is in our control, and some of those things are among the biggest influencers of our sense of well being. In the One you Feed Personal Transformation Program, I work one on one with people to build healthy

habits and achieve their goals through applied behavior science. For example, when my client Janine started working with me, her focus was on regaining some balance in her life personally, I'm looking for overall balance in my life, which I have been for a really long time. If I was trying to implement a new habit or break an old habit, you just try to do too much at once, and I think taking on too much at once is difficult

to make it stick. Janine is certainly not alone. One of the biggest mistakes people make when trying to change things in their lives is to try and do too much at once. There's a real formula for meaningful, sustained change, and that's what I worked with Janine to implement in her life. My overall experience with Eric has been phenomenal. Eric has a way of helping a person come to

their own solutions, helping you dig deep. I would highly recommend Eric's program, and I would highly recommend anything it comes out within the future. If you're tired of waiting for the right circumstances to make progress towards your goals, I, as a behavior coach, can help you to book a free, no pressure, thirty minute call with me to see if the program is right for you. Go to Eric Zimmer

dot coach slash application. My coaching spots fill up fast, so if you're interested, don't wait to look into the program to see if it's right for you. Go to Eric Zimmer dot coach slash application The internal experience of learning for everyone everybody in the world is I suck. I suck, I suck, I suck I suck. Oh look, I don't suck anymore. Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great tinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or

you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jellisa, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life

worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Stephen Cotler, a New York Times bestselling author, award winning journalist, and the executive director of The Flow Research Collective. Stephen is one of the world's leading experts on human performance. He's the author of thirteen books, nine of them best sellers, including the Art of Impossible, A

Peak Performance Primer. I even welcome to the show. Good to be with you, Eric. Your book is called The Art of Impossible, A Peak Performance Primer. And as I was telling you before the show, I have taken perhaps as many notes on this book as any I have read. So we've got a lot of different ways we could take this conversation. But before we get into it, will

start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson in life, and he says, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,

which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you. In your life and in the work that you do. I don't know what it means to you in my life and my work, but I can tell you what it reminds me of, which is one of the really sort of strange and interesting things about human biology and performance is the system. Meaning our biology is designed in a very weird way at every level to go where you look, where you put

your attention is where you end up. And this is very very clear in action sports, where I've done a lot of research, where if you want to, for example, surf a tube, everything that has to take place in that tube takes place basically too faster you to react. All you can really do is put your eyes on the end of the tube and you go there. When you want to ski a really hard straight bine, right, you get to the point where you put your eyes

on the exit and you go there. We're goal directed machines on the internally, and what that essentially means is we don't live in reality. We live in a world that's shaped predominantly by our fears and our goals, and in a sense, on an internal level, with those goals, the way sort of consciousness of biology is designed to work. Once again, you go where you look, you go where

you put your attentions. So I guess in the sense it depends on which one you feed, is roughly the same as a neurobiological principle, which essentially, we go, we real lucky, we go, we put our attention. So I'm gonna start us in an unusual place. It's near the end of your book. Can you describe having lime disease and you describe going out and starting to surf, and

you describe starting to have these mystical experiences. I'm wondering if you could share a little bit more about that, and I'm kind of curious whether they've still continued for you. And then I want to ground some of that back into what the science tells us, because you've done a great job of taking these mystical experiences and bringing them back to some of why we think they might be occurring. So, as you pointed out, when I was about thirty, I

was very sick. I got lime disease, and I spent the better portion of three years in bed, and towards the end, I got dragged out to the Pacific Ocean and put on a surfboard. And this was at a time that I could barely walk across the room. I could focus and think, clear headed and pain free and whatever, maybe thirty minutes a day, and every everything else was

just fuzzy and painful. And I was out there maybe thirty seconds in a wave came and I literally probably took all the energy I had left in the world, and I spun my board around and I popped to my feet, and I popped into a domesion of time I didn't even know exist. At times seemed to slow down. I had slid out of body experience where I felt like I was hugging about my body and sort of

watching myself, but like I had panoramic vision. Um. The most amazing part was that I was clear headed and I felt I felt great, and I hadn't felt even close vaguely normal for three years, so it was astounding. And I felt so good that day, and that experience was so wild that I ended up catching four more waves. And then when that was over, I was done, and I was exhausted, and my friends took me home with me in the bed and didn't move again for about

fourteen days. Fifteen day walk again, I caught a ride to my neighbor, and I went back to the beach and I did it again. And the amazing thing is, over the course about six eight months, I wasn't what from about ten percent functional, meaning like I was functional about ten percent time, about eight functional, And the only thing that I was doing different in my life was going surfing and having these quasi mystical experiences in the waves.

So I was obviously very very curious about what the hell was going on because surfing is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions, and I'm a rational materialist, I'm a science guy. I don't have mystical experiences, and lime is only fatal if it gets into your brain. So I was pretty sure that the real even though I was feeling better, the reason I was having these quasi mystical experiences is because the disease had gotten my brain.

And so I lit on a giant quest to figure out what the heck was going on, and I very quickly discovered that these cause I missed the experiences I have names would call them flow states, and once you start to understand the neurobiology of flow what's going on in the brain, a lot of these so called mystical experiences that show up with this state are obviously very explainable be a biology. But the second half of this question is am I still having these experiences today? Am

I still getting them to flow today? Yes? I'm still getting into flow today. And so would you have described them as mystical then because you didn't know what else to call them and you weren't as experienced with being in flow? Well, time slows down. I had an out a body experience. These are normally things that are classified as mystical experiences, right, time dilation now, but I didn't know at the time as time dilation, which is the

time has extrangely speed upward and slow down. That's actually a foundational property of flow. It's one of the six psychological characteristics that are used to describe the state. So some form of time dilation, usually time speeds up right you you sit down and write a quick email. It's so sucked into what you're doing that an hour goes by you look up and you're like, where did time go?

That's what happens most of the time and flow. Occasionally, though, you get that freeze from effect that happened me in the waves, or it's from your enemy has been a car crash. So let's swing now all the way back around to kind of the beginning of the book. The book is called The Art of Impossible, and you describe two levels of impossible. There's impossible, as in like somebody being able to run the four minute mile, which was

once thought of as impossible. So that's one type. But you describe another type of impossible that might apply to more of the people listening than trying to break a record that's never been broken as an example. Well, I think it all applies to everybody. Let's explain what I mean by that. I have spent my career studying those moments in time when the impossible it comes to possible. I've done this in sports, I've done this in science

and technology and business. Um. Culture. UM. That's what I call capital I impossible, doing that which has never been done. And what you just mentioned is lower case impossible. There's small I impossible, which is sincely who I wrote the book for work right, lessons learned from those people who have accomplished capital impossible. It is for anybody who's going after lower case I impossible, lower case impossible those things we think are impossible for ourselves. I'll give you a

simple example from the book. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio in the nineteen seventies. It was a blue collar steel milltown, and I wanted to be a writer. I mean I wanted to be a writer from the that was five or six years old. I didn't know any writers. I know how you became a writer. There was no one run around to ask. There was no Internet, there were no book street. It was a lower case I impossible, meaning there was no clear path from where I am to where I want to get to, and statistically not

great odds of success. What are other lower case I impossible? That we all kind are more familiar with getting paid for what you love to do, overcoming trauma, overcoming an addiction, becoming world class, and anything to do becoming a successful or artists missing one obvious one that that that's eluding me that I like to grab for. But thinking paints a good picture. But I want to point out a couple of things just to frame this up so people

understand something. When we talk about peak human performance, we're talking about nothing more or less, I guess, than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. That's all that peak human performances. And what this means is if your goal is capital I impossible, that which has never been done, well, that's the biology you're going to draw. That's how you're going to do it. If your goal is small eye impossible, well the biology is

the same, The tools are the same. In fact, if your goal is man small I impossible, cap fun that I'm just trying to get through Monday, right, like, it doesn't matter. The biology is the same. This set of tools are the same because evolution shaped human beings and the work that I do involves figuring out how to

optimize that biology and its scales. Meaning it's the same in everyone or at the Flurrysearch collective, we train on average about a thousand people a month, and we train already from kind of members of the US Special Forces and professional athletes and see suite executive CEOs of major companies all the way to like soccer moms from Ohio and insurance workers from Indiana and you know, software counters

from Bangalore. Right. Because the work that I do is built on biology, principles apply to everybody and anybody can use them. In the book you talk about biology scaling,

but personality doesn't. And so the principles that we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about, and as I mentioned from the number of notes I took, we're going to skim the very slightest surface of But the principles that were about to cover, you're saying are happening at the level of biology, regardless of what our

psychology might be. Yes, personality, what your genetics are. Now, if you're not six ten, you know you're impossible is to be a center in the n b A in your four ft nine Okay, this is not what we're talking about, right, Like that needed different Like, yeah, you need a different book. I can't help you with the genetics park at all. Like that's a different thing. But barring that, yes, biology scales. My work is centered on

the state of performance known as flow. Right, we talked about flow as what I was experiencing out in the waves. It is, as I alluded to, it's defined as an optimal state of consciousness. We will feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, it's any of those moments of rapt attention, total absorption. You get so focused on what you're doing that everything else just disappears right time dialects. As we talked about, your sense of self disappears.

Actually awareness will start to marge in. All aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. We can talk about how what through the roof actually means huge boosts in motivation, grit, productivity, creativity, learning, empathy, perspectives, a little bit of strength, stamina, fast rich washer, plants, a couple other things. We've talking about where the why later, But the point I want to make is those are

basically all the things you want to accelerate for. It's the whole suite, it's all our tools, they're all amplified and flow. And here's the kicker. Everybody's hardwired for floor flow. It's a foundational part of being human. Evolution shaped every human being to perform at their best in float flow is how we do. How we're hard wired for peak performance. There are other things going on during peak performance and other things that lead to it, but it flow is

at the center of it. And one of the most well established facts in flow science is that the state is universal, shows up in anyone anywhere, providing certain initial conditions are meant so everybody watching this, listening to this can get into flow and you can get this same boost in performance. So for starters, that's one thing that

we're talking about. When you say biology scales excellent, and you've written about flow elsewhere, it's been part of your writing for a while now, and so you say that this book expands upon that. Right, It certainly talks about we need flow, but we also have to train up some of the other skills like motivation, learning, and creativity. So a lot of the book is really talking about how we increase our motivation, how we increase our learning,

and how we increase our creativity. So talk about how flow ties together with those three things. So, as I said, peak performance is getting our biology to work for us or then against us. What is that biology? What are the sets of skills being amplified motivation, learning, creativity, and flow? That is what we mean by cognitive peak performance. The way to think about this is, in any situation, any challenge,

motivation is what gets you into the game. Learning is what allows you to continue to play, especially if you're going after like high hard goals that are that are complicated, quite not get their creativities. How you steer right create problem solving that you steer and low is how you sort of turbo boast all those things sort of beyond reasonable expectations. But you asked a sort of different question, which is sort of where I got stuck thinking out,

like which way to frame this? How they relate is interesting. So, as you pointed out, I've been doing this a long time. I've been training people in flow for years and years and years. I think I've probably spoken to or trained a quarter million people. Is that I guess my staff has come up with. I don't know if it's right or not, but somewhere around there's a lot of people.

And what we've learned about flow over the past ten to fifteen years is more about the neurobiology of flow, what's going on in the brain and the body when we're in this state. And psychology is useful, but it's often metaphor. Neurobiology is mechanism. So if you want to make something reliable and repeatable, you want mechanism. So that is what has happened. We've got very good at training flow.

And when I say very good, I said that the Flow Research Collective we trained about a thousand people a month. We measure flow with the standard psychological instrument pre and post, and we see about a seventy boost in flow consistently back into our trainings. But but and button is how

everything is related. What we used to see is you get this big burst and flow because it turns out this is easy to train, and then there will be the spectacular return to baseline, like they give a ton of flow and then it would just like somebody turned off the flow tap and flow is one of the most pleasurable, addictive, meaningful, life affirming experiences we can possibly have. And you give people a whole lot more of that and then you take it away or stop showing up.

You have very piste off people, and we had very piste off people. And so it's been a really long time trying to figure out what the hell is going wrong? What is this? And what we realized is the problem wasn't flow. It was that all the stuff that flow amplifies, but specifically motivation, learning and creativity, if you hadn't trained those things up at alongside flow, you couldn't keep pace

with the acceleration that the state provided. And worse, when psychologists and researchers talking about motivation, the term is technically defined is the energy for action, But what they really mean is a whole bunch of stump motivations that catch all term for external motivation or extrinsic motivations, so like money, sex, fame, things in the world that we want intrinsic motivation, internal motivators like curiosity or passion or purpose. We're also talking

about goal setting and grit. And if you haven't done really good grit work right, flows is enormously pleasurable experience, but it doesn't last forever, and you haven't done the good, selling good work, there are gonna be days where there's no flow the right and it's just hard work, hard slogging. And if you haven't done the work to develop really good grit skills, those days are going to be very, very difficult. They get a little easier because of flow,

and we know that flow massively aquifies grit. But some people have this problem when they do this flow work, where they start to feel that it's a bliss chunky problem. Flow is so addictively pleasurable right there, like, oh dude, everything's got to feel is good. This is not life supposed to feel well, No, no, it's not. And there's times when you can't get into flow and you haven't done the really hardcore grit work, you can't sustain the flow.

It's not simple but important. I think, yeah, absolutely, that really covered it. And I think you make that point a bunch of times, and I think it's an important one that on our way too impossible flow is an absolute booster, necessary but not sufficient, yep. And that it feels really good. But along the way too impossible, there's gonna be a lot of feeling not very good also, And if all we're thinking about is oh a lot, like you said, I should be feeling flow, I should

be feeling good. This should always be wonderful, we won't have what it takes to keep going all the way too impossible, because there are times it's not easy. The way I put it in the book, I think more we're meaningful does not always mean more pleasant. And that is very, very true. In fact, interestingly, when positive psychologists talk about happiness these days, there's three levels of happiness available on the planet. The first level is is happy

is how do you feel right here, right now? There's not a whole lot you can do about that level. Right you can make yourself as Dan Harris said, tenders unhappier gratitude practices, mindfulness practice is regular. Actually there's stuff you can do, but because of how emotional set points work, those points are set up usually by ten eleven years old. And this is the worst we're going to feel and

is the best we're gonna feel in our lives. Gonna take place pretty much in the middle and borrowing chronic unemployment or the death of a child. On the low end, that's the low end. It doesn't move. It's pretty set. High end can move with constant postures flow, but it's generally doesn't. In other words, you can get tenders and happy, that's about it. And flow is no guarantee that you're going to be happier because flow takes place when we're pushing on our skills to the utmost. So usually when

we're doing that, we're uncomfortable. And if you're really a peak performer, you're going to be uncomfortable so all the time, right, because you're always sort of trying to push on your skills and be a little better, and be a little better, you get very good at being uncomfortable, comfortable being uncomfortable, but moment to moment happiness probably doesn't move much. The next two levels of happiness available to you being the second level of high flow lifestyle. Right, it's a lifestyle

in which you get regular access to flow. This could be doesn't matter what you do, but maybe what you do doesn't produce a lot of flow. I live in how and all around me there's tons of people who work whatever job they can get in the summer so they can ski all winner. That's a high flow lifestyle, right. The best we get to feel all the planet is a high flow lifestyle where the thing that is giving

us the most flow is coupled to our purpose. And you know, as a guy who my wife and I ran an animal sanctuary, I'm kind of in a very very very poor rural county for a very long time with a lot of animal cruelty. That's a very high flow lifestyle with a lot of purpose. It was also pretty miserable, grueling, difficult work. It produced a lot of flow along the way and a lot of meaning. My point is that that kind of work produces deep meaning,

deep contentment, deep purpose, deep peace. Even but happiness is a thin drug. Ultimately, that's I think what you start to discover overview. It's not that you don't want to be happy, it's that it's a thin drug and there are much better drugs out there right right, and often aiming right at happiness. Is that being the goal is particularly counterproductive? Oh yeah, it's a good way to miss it. Yeah,

it's a good way to miss it. So what I'm gonna do from here is we're just gonna skip through a few different parts of the book and hit some different things that bring together some of these different components

of motivation, learning, and curiosity. So I want to talk about motivation for a minute, because you talk about there being a stack that's really important in the drive part of motivation, which we would think of is the way most people typically think of motivation as I feel like doing something right, I have the energy to want to do something. And you mentioned that there are really five things that make up this drive stack. You talk about curiosity, passion, purpose,

and then autonomy and mastery. After those, I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about curiosity, because the way that you laid out for people to find some of their curiosity I really loved. I really liked some of the exercises that were there, and so I was wondering if you could walk us through briefly the basic exercise and how somebody can start to find maybe what their curiosity is. I hear this up from a lot

of people. I don't quite know what it is. How you cultivate a passion by sort of going through the gate of curiosity. I guess we'll be a better way to say it. So, as you pointed out, there are a bunch of intrinsic motivators. There are way more than the five you mentioned curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, master but those tend in the science to be the biggest five. Right. You could list intrinsic motivators forever, but those are the

biggest five. And what the research shows is that if you want more motivations in your life, you actually start with extrinsic motivators. You've got to start like with you need enough money in a sense to take care of basic safety and security needs. You have to add deal safety and security first. Now it's a little bit. What the research shows is you basically have to be able to pay all your bills and have a little left over for discretionary spending. A little it's not a lot.

Once that's in place, if you want more motivation, more productivity, more energy for action. Turns out it's not that we stopped wanting things like money, sex and fame. We still want them, but as a driver of performance and productivity, they're not as powerful as internal motivators are intrinsic drivers, and there's five of them, as you pointed out, Curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy,

and mastery. These are the big five. And what you notice among peak performers everywhere is much in the way that you like anybody. An athlete will like stack fuel sources, meaning they're always going to hydrate super well. They're going to make sure they have enough protein and carbs and fats and blah blah blah right, and the right nutrition and the right supplements in the right everything. You also

want to stack internal fuel sources. It's hard to do anything in this world, and it's hard to go after anything high hard goals. You need as many of internal fuel sources as you possibly can get. In other you want. All your intrinsic motivators are big five aligned and point in the same direction, and they're actually built that way. They're built to come online a certain order and to point us in direction. And as you pointed out, the

most foundational human motivators curiosity. So, whether way, what's the big deal about intrinsic motivators? Like, why do we even care? Why are we having this conversation? Intrinsic motivators give us focus for free. That's the really big deal. Your brain takes about of your energy at rest, and it's yet it's two percent of your body weight. It's a giant energy hog, right, and focus is a huge, huge, huge caloric energy expense. You're curious about it. You're paying attention

without working too hard or at all. That's great. Now, Curiosity, as you alluded to, is designed biologically to be built into passion. When people say passion, what that looks like biologically is often just the intersection of multiple curiosities. The way to think about this is like, maybe you're interested

in football and you're interested in nutrition. Now, each of those on their own, they may not have enough energy kind of be a lifelong passion something you're gonna spend your whole life, you know, totally paying attention to all the time. But if you can figure out where three or four year curiosities intersect and get a couple of easy wins there and get some other things going on that I talked about in the Art of Impossible. That's

sort of the ingredient for passion. Now, if anybody wants to know how to do this, yes, you can read The Art Impossible, but I can make it easier on you. You can go to www. The Passion Recipe dot com, which is we basically took these chapters because this was so important to so many people. We turn it into an interactive workbook. It's free. We just put it online for people, um the Passion recipe dot com. It teaches you how to cultivate and turn curiosity into passion and

turn passion into purpose. So if you want to cultivate curiosity, you really just want to start with twenty five things you're interested in. And all I mean by interested it is so you're a free weekend, you would maybe want to spend it watching a couple of movies about the subject, or reading a book, or having a conversation or two with an expert. Right, that's what I mean interested. Make a list of twenty five things you're interested in. The

key here is trying to be as specific as possible. Right, don't be interested in football. Be interested in the past blocking mechanics required to play left tackle as precise as you possibly can be. Right. I loved your punk rock analogy. You gotta you gotta give the if you remember. Don't be interested in punk rock. Right, don't be interested in

punk rock. Be interested. I think it was the evolution of political punk from crass to ry is against Um had an old girlfriend who lived in the original Crafts Commune And uh, I don't know. I'm just a huge rise against fan, I guess, but which is true? Do you love against Me? I do love against Me? They got a little more melodic. I really like early against Me. It's a little too poppy for me. Like it's not quite as punk as they were, and I like the older punk better. But I really do like Against Me

a lot. They've got a handful of my absolute favorite punk songs ever, Miami Baby, I'm an Anarchist. Yeah. They're live record that they put out. I love it. I don't know if you love it. It's so good. The live version of the lyric is Convol's yea, what the hell from her lips to God's Ears? I think that's the name of the song from Her Lips to God's Ears. The live version of that is really good. Um, and Potatoes, rice and Beans live is really good on that album

as well. They're amazing live band. So we've we've railed ourselves now. But back to plunk is something. Now you've got my attention. Maybe we'll see if we lead back around to it. So we're making a list of things things you're interested in, and then you just want to look for places they intersect. So you know I said nut, Let's say nutrition is also on your list. Um again, too vague, right, you're interested in the past blocking mechanics to play left tackle and nutrition is too big. But

maybe you're the example. Like, given the book, insects as a few food source, right, so where could it possibly intersect? Well, it requires a lot of calories to play left tackle, right, would insects make a good football food? That's an intersection? And all I say is when you find those intersections, play there for a while. Just play there, go there, hang out, spend ten minutes twenty minutes a day, do this over months and months and months. Test out those intersections.

See which ones are really sticky and grabby for you. Where there's a lot of energy. But if you can figure out where three or four or of your curiosities intersect and start playing there and learning stuff and getting some easy wins along the way, that's how we build passion. A couple of things that are worth pointing out, though, because people have this problem when they start cultivating passion, is they think about passion. I say, you know, give

me an example of athletic passion. You get like Lebron James coming in for the dunk, you know, with the skull on his face and the finals, right, And yes, you're right, that is passion. But that is a late stage passion. That is not what early stage passion looks

like or feels like. Early stage passion is just a little kid standing in the driveway trying to get a basketball to drop, and it feels like that on the inside, right, It feels more like curiosity and little successes than like this burning, consuming thing that you think if you expect to this like giant burning fire all at once, it's not going to be there. And the other thing is

you don't want it. They're right away. What you want to do is slowly cultivate your passion and make sure You've got it right, because you don't want to be a couple of years into this is my passion to discover Oh shit, it was only a phase, right. I don't actually want to spend the next two years on an archaeological dig in the deserts of Egypt because no, it turns out it was a phase. Right, Like when you come to that point, if you screw it up,

it's really demotivating. So on the front, and you want to go slowly here. This is not one one of those things in peak performance. Um, everybody can do this. Everybody can figure align their curiosities, built them into passion, build passion and a purpose. We're all biologically hardwired for it. We all can do it. But you want to do it slowly, and you don't want to be in a rush in this case, right. A lot of people are

really impatient to be there already and get it. And and here you really don't The system, the biology is designed for this to be cultivated over time, and you don't want to make an error on this when this is one of those places where you gotta go slow to go fast. Yeah, I love you saying the book. You know, we often think of like you said passion, get obsessed, stay obsessed, and you say, you know, let's

start with get curious, stay curious. All right, I'm gonna jump right out of that section, even though we could go from there into how to turn that passion into a purpose and you know, autonomy and mastery in that area. But I want to move into a little bit about grit, and I want to talk about the idea of learning to work with our thoughts as part of grit. Oh yeah, that's really key. So place to start, I guess is

that the psychologists define grit. They often define it using angulated Duckworth's definition as the intersection of passion and perseverance. And I love Angela's work. She's exceptionally bright woman. She's done excepotlually great research. But when you talk to peak performers about grit, they actually say, hey, wait, they train six different kinds of grit skills and all sort of require different techniques, and in the end they sort of all will boil down to the same thing, but you

have to train them independently for a while. The first is the perseverance, the grit we're all familiar with, right, kick me in in the teeth pudge me that gut doesn't matter. I'm still coming. And that's the that's the first level of great as often and by the way, it's if you want to train that level of grit, that level of perseverance, um you want to start physically.

The research says, even if you want to train it cognitively, which is the question that you asked about, and we're going to get there, the place to start is physically and by perseverance. If you work out, you go to the gym and you normally do three sets of ten when you bench press, next time, do two sets of ten and one set of eleven, very very slowly. You just want to push outside your comfort zone a little bit at a time, over and over and over again.

And here's the key, especially on perseverance side, because this is this is tricky and people miss this a lot. It's not enough to put in the hard work to get grittier. You have to notice. So you have to in other words, you got it. Yes, you've got to show up and do that x eleventh eleventh rep. You know every time you work out just for the next month, but you also got to remember at the end of the month to look back and go wow the entire time. Every time I had to do that eleventh breath, I

got it. I'm tough enough to do that. You've got to remember to notice that you're developing grit along the way, which is really important because you have to trust that grit for it to really make a difference in your life. You need to being able to know that you go into the situation, you're actually grittier, right, Like you can handle a little bit more, which is why we want to do this for a long period time, and we want to pay attention to it. Once you've sort of

become a little physically grittier. The next thing to pay attention to if you're interested in performance, if you're interested in getting through tomorrow, I think, is the grit to control your thoughts. You've got to pay attention to what's going on up here, because you know, if you're anything like me, it's bad upstairs a lot of the time, right, And so if I'm not kind of paying attention to what's going on in my head, it can often swallow me.

There's a number of different ways to sort of tune your thoughts and work with this particular problem. Gratitude less or mindfulness, breathwork meditation. These are two really really great methods. There's a lot of other stuff you can do. If you're more kind of kinesthetically oriented like me, you may do you may prefer yoga to just straight up meditation, because there's some movement involved. But there's a lot of different ways to sort of get some space between kind

of thought and emotion. There's a gap between thought and emotion. What we want to try to do is like stretch it out so that when the thought pops up before you get super ang and totally lose your taper at your wife or house or husband or howmever, you have a second to get in there and be like whoa, whoa, Right, really sure this is the reaction you want? You bring

up a couple of different things here. One is this idea of using the phrase controlling our thoughts, which you then later sort of say, well, that's a little bit of a misnomer, right, any of us who have sat down to meditate. No, the initial sort of launch of a thought into our brain is not really a controllable phenomenon. What comes up is what comes up. It's really what we do after that. And I love that you talk about the self talk. You say self talk is really important.

Here there's a quote in here from Michael Gervais that I absolutely love, and listeners will have heard me talk about this a lot. And he says that there's only two kinds of thoughts, those that constrictest or those that expand us. And I think that is such a powerful idea, you know, even and when decision making is this decision gonna make me bigger or smaller, it's gonna expand me or contract to me that that core idea is so powerful, I think so too. Well. What I like about it

is for me. When Mike first said it to me, I thought about, well, I know what thoughts that create more space feel like intern right, And so that I was like, Oh, this is totally applicable because I know what this feels like. So I can steer from this right off the bat. Mike's very, very good at that at coming up with performance tools. We're like, oh, I like, not only do I know what you mean, I know what it feels like. That's who I love it too. Yeah,

So I'll tell you something funny about this. This is not exactly in the art of impossible. We were having this conversation on this this phrase. So I was skiing week and half ago, one of the biggest lines I've ever skied of my life. And uh, there's a hundred foot straight line at the end of it, which means you don't get to turn for a hundred feet. You just like your pin between two rock walls, and you just have to hold keep it together until you get

to the exit or you'll die. And it's terrifying. And I got into the straight line and my right ski hit a bunch of ice icicles actually that were fallen off the trees and into the run, and it was like my right ski was bouncing on marbles and the guy was skiming. I said later, it looked like I started to tip forward and like I was gonna somersault, which would have put me in the hospital easy possibly worse.

And my internal experience, the way I described to afterwards, like my brain found another gear, which I appropriately referred to as fuck this. I'm not dying now, right, But I like, I got incredibly angry in the moment, like in rage, and I get what what he said is. It just looked like I sat back up and shot out of there. And I remember nothing at other than just being like, Wow, this is that feeling that precedes the I'm falling now, which precedes the i'mgoing to the

hospital now. And I was like, I'm not, like no, and I got super angry. And what was interesting, and this is why I'm bringing this up, is we were talking about that experience in the context of Mike's quote, because you would not expect like anger to be a thought that creates space, but in this particular case, this particular context, it was the only tool, right If I wouldn't have grabbed for something that would have given me a lot of testosterone and adrenaline at that moment, I

had to fight against gravity, right like Isaicle stripped beforeward, which is really interesting. And we were talking about how sometimes thoughts that creates space are not going to be the obvious ones. Sometimes. That was what the conversation was, and I thought it was I thought it was an interesting, subtle point in one I hadn't thought about before. Yeah,

that's a great story. We're nearing the end of our time, but let's hop scotch ahead in the book here, and I want to talk about another part that I absolutely loved, which was the five steps to learn anything. Wait wait, wait, wait wait, you left out the most important part of that title, the five steps to learn anything before you have a public opinion on it. Five not so easy steps to learn anything. Yes, you're right, five not so easy steps. Yes, I better add that to my outline.

And you sort of talk about the other part of it that I loved is you're like, before I'm going to have a public opinion about something, I'm going to have gone through those And I remember thinking, boy, that would be refreshing for the world for more people to think, well, before I'm going to have an opinion on that, I'm

going to go through these five steps. It was really practical, and it really sort of dovetailed in ways with my experience of learning things, and and there were some subtle these that I had not thought of before that I think will help me in the future. So let's just kind of go through them relatively quickly. There's a lot of detail in there, But here's the big idea. What's worth knowing is learning works a certain way in the brain.

We're designed to learn in a certain way, and if you can sort of do that and harness that, you can get a lot farther faster. So in the five not so Easy steps, basically a lesson in how to read and how to learn from This is about knowledge acquisition, not skills acquisitions. So this is about how do you learn a subject. It's going to involve reading. And one of what I want to talk about now is what

do you pay attention to do? Will you read? Because it's from a neurobiological standpoint, it's not what you think it is, and it's much more interesting when you actually know how the how the brain work is designed to work makes it so much easier. So the things that I talked about paying attention to when you're reading, when you're trying to learn, because it's not what you did in high school or what you did in school, and it's almost the exact opposite one. Your brain loves narrative.

Your brain has caused an effect all the time, right, this caused this? Why? Because we want to know that, we want to know how to like create our future, right, we want to know if this causes this. I know how to get that, I know how to intervene, I know how it works. That's what a narrative is, That's what a story is. This happened. First, this happens, that, this happened. Third, Right, So when you're reading, one of the first things we want to pay attention to a

little bit is history, the history of a subject. First of all, stop being intimidated by subjects. Just realized that any intellectual subject, whatever it is, it's just a voyage of discovery. Somebody a question, they answered that question. That led to another question, and somebody had another question and they answered that one of the right, that's the voyage of discovery. That is any subject, and it's a narrative. And so just pay a little bit of attention to

the order. The narrative is the big Christmas tree. If you give your brain the Big Christmas tree, when the individual facts show up ornaments, you'll have an easier time remembering them because your brain is gonna be like, oh, this happened, and put this fact right there. It slots in. This is something your brain naturally does, so you're just taking advantage of kind of your own basic software there. The second thing you want to pay attention to is

terminology jargon. And what I mean by that is, and I will be the first person I like, I have a flat rule in my company, and by my life. If somebody needs a lot of big words to explain it, they're probably lying. So that I learned as a journalist right for years and years and years, I met the smartest people on the planet, and most of them can explain their thing to you as if you were five years old. It's always the folks who don't quite know

what they're talking about that make it really fancy. In my opinion, that said jargon, while super annoying, tends to be annoyingly precise and technical language often contains most of a subject. So when people talk about I need to learn a new subject, a large chunk of what they're actually saying is you need to learn vocabulary. So the way I do it is, when I'm reading one of these books, if I'm getting fancy language showed up that I don't understand. The first time I see the word,

I ignored. The second that I see the word I ignored. If I see a technical word that's three, three or four times in the book, I look it up, and then every time I see it from that point on, I just say the definitional out loud, right Instead of reading the word, I read the definition until it starts to stick. And the reason is just by learning those definitions, you start to learn huge, huge, massive amounts about the subject,

and then you have the overarching history. But here's the most important thing, and this is the secret to learning. When you're written a book, pay attention to what I call your emotional wows, those curiosity moments where you go, what the hell are that's so cool and its ideas start firing. The reason is this curiosity is neurobiologically a little bit of doping and a little bit of ara

up and effort. Those are the two neurochemicals that appear on the brain that helped produce this decision of curiosity. But they do something else. They prime learning. When they're in our brain, we have a much easier time remembering what we're learning. So right down, this is the only thing I really take notes on when I when I read are my emotional wows? Oh on paid seventy seven. Here's this really cool idea about pattern recognition and the brain,

and it reminds me of blah blah blah. I follow my curiosity that way, I remember it. I follow my brain through a subject. As long as you follow your curiosities through a subject. Now, by the way, this is not how you master a subject to passive test in college. This is not going to help you there. This is like actual, real, practical, real world applicable knowledge that you can do ship with passing a test. You have requirements

for that test. This will help. But if you're read Ethan Frome in college and they're gonna ask you, you may want to write down more than just the emotional wows. Okay, so caveat there. But this will really really help because by following our curiosity, we're following our natural learning software. That's how I do it. The other thing that I always point out to people because people make this mistake. I don't know if it's that we were taught this in school or we just assume this because it seems

like common says don't always need to understand everything. Learning means being uncertainly internal experience of learning for everyone everyone in the world is I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck. Oh look, I don't suck anymore, right, that's the experience of it. In fact, my buddy Andrew

Human is a Stanford neuroscientist. We do a lot of work with he says, you know, he does a lot of work with the Navy Seals, and he says, you know, one of the things that peak performers, especially spec ops guys, know that everybody else doesn't is that peak performance it's always crawl, wall, run. And the biggest difference pieces between pea performers and everybody else is that peak performers know this, and everybody else show up and they're like, dude, man,

I don't crawl, I don't even walk. I'm gonna figure out what the shortcut is. I'm gonna start by a jog, right, And peak performers show up and they're like, you know what, Okay, I gotta crawl. Then I'm gonna walk, and then maybe I'll run. And it's gonna suck. I suck, I suck, I suck, I suck, and there's nothing to do but to do it. And it's funny because you see these top performers and we often think, oh my god, they're so far ahead of the rest of us. How did

they get there. One of the main ways they got there is every time they're faced with the challenge, they know it's gonna suck, and they just don't care. They just lean right In the rest of us, when faced with the challenge, we ditherer around for a while. We're eventually going to rise to the challenge and do the thing. You've got to get it done, sooner or later. You got to. But most of us are like, oh really, I got let me call my father and Tello about

all the ship I got it. You know, we do all that, But big performers just like, nope, crawl walker on. I'm just gonna lean and immediately. I loved that whole section, and I think what you just said there is a great place for us to wrap up the conversation, which is really that idea of crawl walk run. I talked about it all the time on the show. We just talked about this idea of you know, sometimes we've got to be willing to take baby steps. We've got to

start where we are and move through the progression. I gotta tell you something. I think it's all baby steps, but you've just got to be willing to continue to take baby steps. One of the things I tell people this isn't a Drew, but as a general because of emotional set points, if you've sort of survived being a teenager, you've already felt just about the worst that life can offer you. I'm not saying you can't have that bad feeling for days and days and weeks and months on ends,

you know what I mean. But emotional set points are sort of set up by around you know, ten or eleven or twelve, by like bad experiences, good experiences, and most of life takes place in between. And then you get teenagers where your hormones are raging and you have

no control of your emotions. So honestly, again, as I said earlier, unless there's the death of a child, the chronic unemployment, which can change this as a general rule, if you've survived being a teenager, you've suffered the worst that you're going to suffer on any peak performance path, taking those baby steps, which is a strange thing to realize, but it seems to be biologically true. Awesome, Well, Stephen, thank you so much. I found the book absolutely fascinating.

As I said, I took so many notes, my curiosity points of things that jumped off the page, because that's the way I prepare for these interviews what excites me. There were a ton of them. Well, thank you, I appreciate that. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show. I appreciate it my pleasure. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You

Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support now. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the One you Feed community, go to when you feed dot net slash Join the One

You Feed podcast. Would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.