Steven Kotler || The Art of Impossible

Stephen is a New York Times bestselling author and award winning journalist and the executive director of the Full Research Collective. He is one of the world's leading experts on human performance. Is the author of nine bestsellers out of thirteen books total, including The Art of Impossible, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, and Bowld

and Abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pultzer Prizes, translated into over forty languages, and appeared in over one hundred publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic Monthly Time, and the Harvard Business Review. Stephen is also the co host of Flull Research Collective Radio. Along with his wife, author Joy Nicholson, he's the co founder of the Rancho de Chiowawa Hospice and Special Needs Dog Sanctuary. Steven, what a true pleasure this is going to be to

chat with you today. God, it's great to be with you. This book that you've published. First of all, congratulations in a lot of ways. Would you say it's kind of like your magnum opus. Would that be fair to say that up to this point? In invert like you brought that up a while ago, a month two months ago, you asked me a similar question. And I've literally been thinking about it ever since because it wasn't intentionally that book,

but it is. There's thirty years of research by all everything I've studied over him, as like in my entire racibook career, it's in there. Is there? Yeah? And I didn't actually realize that I'm too you when you said that, because I think you use the word magnamobus or something like that. I was sort of like stunned by that. I was like, really, huh, what's he looking at? And I looked and I was like, oh crap, he's right

kind of right? How is it not? Is the question, Yeah, no, I know, I actually think I actually think you're you know, better or worse. Right, I think you're gonna be a bagnomobus that the world has to like it first or something like that. So that that's still debatable. I guess it is thirty years of research, right, thirty years of psychology and neuroscience and my own you know, weird weirdness turned into one thing, yeah for sure. So yeah, huge

gratulations and I wish it a great success. But just tracing the development of your own thinking about this topic, because you, you know, you wrote about extreme sports and then you you expanded and you looked at everyone and how can everyone the person who's not trying to be an extreme sports athlete, but how in their daily life can they kind of get into that very similar flows state? Right?

And then this one is even broader than flow. It's it's high performance more broadly in all the many different facets and things that interleave. When that, how's your own thinking on this topic changed your whole thinking on human potential? I would say, most broadly, how has that changed since you first started writing about this topic? A good hard question. So when I think about what went into the art impossible.

There are like three or four sort of developmental stages problems I was trying to solve questions I was trying to answer. One of them is the was was because flow as a state of optimal performance, amplifies motivation and grit and productivity and creativity and learn all these subcategories. If I wanted to be an expert at flow, I had to understand how did these things work and how do they relate to flow? And you know, there's millions of experts in each of those subcategories. You're one of

the world's leading experts on creativity. You've probably forgotten more about creativity than I'm ever going to know. But the one thing that I managed to notice is that when you're looking at all this stuff, because it's flow, and it captures all of it, like, oh wow, it's all

a system, it's a sequence, it's a process. Of course, it is with biological organisms, and all of these components are linked together, and they're meant to work together, and they were meant to work apparently by the science in a particular order, et cetera, et cetera. That was that took a really that's a weird perspective, and it took

a while to sort of develop that. I was that all these components that tons of people were looking at and sort of writing books about, right, they're great books on focus and grit and flow and creativity and learn all that stuff, that they were all part of one system. That was it that emerged over time was part one.

And the second thing that emerged over time that was very complimentary was the idea that you know, I've been training people in flow and how to lives flow for a lot of years, twenty years at this point, some very very long period of time, and I've trained a tremendous amount of people. And flow is you know, when you start with the neuroscience, it's kind of remarkably easy to train, but it is not that that heightened amount of flow that you can get people in their life.

It doesn't seem to be sustainable for everybody. And you know when, first of all, when you're what you're doing is you're selling courses that will help people achieve more flow in your life, and they're getting a bunch more flow, and then suddenly they start dropping out a flow like flies. You have very angry customers, and you know what I mean like frustrated people on top of everything else. And so I was looking at why is that the case? And I started to realize it was very very clear

that its flow is one part of it. But the whole puzzle is if you haven't trained up learning skills or creativity skills, or the motivation skills or the grit skills or whatever the subcategories are the stuff that flow is going to amplify. Even though flow will amplify them, you don't have a strong enough foundation to sustain the amplification. If you don't know how to learn blow demands the challenge skills balance that you push your skills to the

utmost constantly To do that. That requires learning all the time. So you're learning and you're growing. If you don't have good foundational learning skills, for example, really basic stuff like you were not you don't have a truth that the term I use a truth filter. My truth filder was journalism and investigative journalism. How do you find truth in there?

Scientists have the scientific method. You know, Elon Musk talks about first principle thinking, but these are basically all ways of assessing information quickly, and so you know, do I trust it? Do I should? I not trust it? Right? And they facilitate rapid learning. If you don't have those kinds of skills, I can amplify a flow all you want,

you can't sustain the amplification. So that was the second realization, is that you actually have to train all these things up at once if you really want the full turbo boost. And the third realization, this was the last one coming was and you, I'm sure came to these same and Maslow said years ago, is I'm sure you know whatever one can be, one must be. And what he's talking

about is exactly what showed up in the research. If you, for example, when you look at intrinsic motivation, right, the big five intrinsic motivators that talk about our curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and master right, utilizing those gives you a huge boost and motivation, et cetera, et cetera, which you can use to go after high, hard goals, to go big. Right,

that's the whole point of the book. But it turns out not going big, not trying to rise to our full potential, is horrible for us, psychologically horrible for us. And this was what was so shocking. I was looking at major causes of anxiety and depression, of which there are eight, and there are two that get all the attention, right, genetics and trauma. And yet if you look into the data, as you know, genetics is like a fifty percent cause

of depression. It's always genetics and something else. And in terms of trauma, occasionally trauma does lead to post traumatic stress disorder, but the vast majority of the time and most of us, trauma leads to post traumatic growth. Right. The world breaks everyone, and many year stronger at the broken places, and that's what the research shows. But the other six causes of depression will give you one of the major ones lack of meaningful work. And what is

lack of meaningful work? When you dig under the hood, it's work that you're not curious about, that you're not passionate about, that's not aligned with your purpose and your values, that you don't have autonomy to pursue your own interests in, and you don't have the opportunity for mastery, and it

doesn't produce flow. That's what lack of meaningful work actually means in practice, right, And what that really means is lack of access to the neurobiological changes, curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery, actually, give you right, that's really what we're talking about as the causes. And that was the most shocking sort of finding in the end. That was when the urgency for the book started to like increase in my mind. I was like, oh, wow, this isn't just there isn't just

a blueprint for how to go big. Not going big is bad for us. And maybe this has been widely known for a long time by a lot of people that I was the last to know. But like when I started, I remember the first time I was reading Lost Connections Careers, right about the eight major causes of depression, and that's where I as I was reading it, and it was four or five years ago, I was like, wow, these look really familiar. He looks everything I was reading.

I was like, this is the inverse of exactly what I'm looking at on the peak performance side. And you know, of course it is, we're one biological organism that makes sense. But it was a kind of a shocking discovery in a sense. And I think those three lines of thinking are the lines of thinking that sort of led me in this direction. It was, of course there's been phenomenal neuroscience done on all these topics now too, and that's my thing. I want to take it. I love the psychology.

I think the psychology incredibly useful, but most of the time it's metaphorical. It's not the thing. It's not mechanism. And I'm I think we can get the mechanism. Stuff becomes much more trainable, which is my only point. Trainable useful. Right, that's not better or at worse not you know, and I but it does seem to even more trainable, and that is what seems to matter. So like, yeah, those were the sort of big three insights. God did I

talk for a long time to answer that question. I apologize, No, no problem, that those are great insights training. I feel like there's a lot of pressure to try to train flow because people are paying money and and they're expecting, you know, just get me into the full sted. I'm paying you money, so get me in the and so I feel like there's gonna be a lot of pressure on you, you know, be like, well, it's does not

that it doesn't work like that. If I mean, that'd be great that if that works like that, then then all the top one percent billionaires would automatically be in flow more than Yeah, exactly, I would. I would I'd be out of a job, right, yeah, yeah, there wouldn't

be a need a need for me. But I will say all this stuff, flow turned out to be a lot more reliable and repeatable than I think anybody suspected back in the nineties when we were trying to like if you look at Susan Jackson's work flow in sports, for example, where there's a really good breakdown of her frustrations and trying to teach top athletes how to drop in the flow, and you know, the hit rate is

it's not great. And yet we're using the same exact tool she was using to mestra flow pre and post and we're seeing reliably on the back end of our training is like a seventy percent boost and flow. And I don't think it's that our kung fu is so bad ass. It's that things have gotten down to the neurobiology and biology scales. Right. It shared between all of us, evolutions shaped us all this way, and you get down to that level, I think it's much more effective for

all kinds of people. Well, you know, in your book, you say biology scales. Personality doesn't What does that catch phrase mean? So Steve color catchphrase? I love just Steve a Coultler catch phrase. I guess you've got a lot of those. You got a lot of those, and I quote them. You have another one. Flow is the most addictive thing in the world. You know, I love your catch phrases. But yeah, explain that one. I can go longer on this, but let me give you this short version.

You can. You can poke at it however you want, really really often in p performance and coaching very much when you start moving into this self help, you know, the sort of the less science based stuff. What you see is people figure out what works for themselves and they try to teach it to other people. And as a general rule, it doesn't work. And I learned this lesson the real hard way. But as a general rule,

it doesn't work. And the reason it doesn't work is personality has a huge influence on how any person should approach peak performance. For example, where you are on the introversion to extraversion scale, or what are your risk tolerances? Those are huge important foundational questions, and there's created those are personality questions. Right, your risk tolerances these are genetically hardwired at or established by really early childhood experience. Now

the research says you can change them. You can become more risk friendly, miss risk tolerance over but it's like trying to change a character trait. You can do it. We didn't used to think we could. Now we know you can, but it seems to be very very slow, takes a long time, doesn't happen easily. So, for example, my early career as a journalist and especially covering action sports and other things I was covering in both journalism

and action sports. For the people I was around, if you were not literally nearly dying once a month or something like that, you weren't doing your job. That was just a typical normal day in the life of this. And this was almost everybody I knew. I thought this was normal. My risk tolerances are crazy. So when I learned a little bit about flow and peak performance and got cocky, and you know, I like people believe me. I was writing for blog for Psychology today, I had

books on the New York Times. You know, people believe me. And I was trying to teach people this is what worked for me. Do this, do this, do this. I put a guy in the hospital. I nearly caused it the force. One of my friends still isn't talking to me. It's been twenty years. Like it was, I mean, a mess of people's lives, and I was really I was like, what the hell went wrong? Because this stuff I knew, this stuff works so well. And that was where that

insight sort of came from. I was like, whoa personality. There's too much stuff that is individual that affects how you make foundational peak performance decisions. That's individual. You can't what works for me is not going to work for you. You You can't train it that way. It's dangerous, it's not helpful to the people you're teaching biology. If you get things down to hey, there are seven foundational emotional systems that are found in all mammals, including humans. They

work this way. They have each neuro different neurotransmitters, different networks in the brain, et cetera, et cetera. When that is conserved among not just all humans, but all species. So when you take things to that level, you can be sure it's going to work for everybody because it's shared, it's conserved, it's not altered by early childhood experience and you know, individual genetics and things like that. So that's

what I mean by personality doesn't scale in biology scales, gotcha. Yeah, And I like that you acknowledge that personality traits really do make a difference in terms of this. And I've been thinking about the role of personality differences and extent to which things are possible for you, and it seems

like confidence is a big one. And I feel like confidence or self efficacy needs to be earned in order to be most effective, at least, that you need to have some sense that you're So yeah, I'm so glad you said this. So I've been this is you're talking about confidence, but it's also truin grit. So in trying to train people to be gritty, there's actually two stages

to the process. There's first you have to go out and let's say it's physical grit, right, You're trying to get grittier physically, which, by the way, the research says is if you want to be grittier cognitively or emotionally

or whatever, start physically. It's the one skill that it does seem that training it physically first work helps, But first you have to push a little bit harder today on your workout, and then you have to do it again tomorrow, and then you have to do it the day after, and the day after you have to do the actual work. That's not even the issue. The issue is you yourself have to trust yourself to do the work. Meaning you're you're there's a there's a gap, right, you don't.

It's not just I'm gritty enough to do it. It's I have the confidence in my grit so that I know going into any situation, I've got this extra in the tank. Right. That is so, And it's tricky because it's a different thing. I'll give you a simple example from again physical, but this is a this is a different if you break a bone. If you're an action sport athlete and you break a bone, it's really common.

The recovery may take six months, six months to nine months for the broken ban, but psychologically your body will govern. We'll put a governor on your ability to move its speed or to go full out. It'll take about a year year and a half to get over this. The unconscious governor on your behavior that your that your brain is layering in because your brain no longer trusts you to operate at highst at that speed without damaging the

vessel kind of thing. And you have to re earn the trust of the adaptive a conscious in the sense, which is an odd thing, but it seems to be very true. We earn the trust of the cognito unconscious. Yeah, that's that's that's a really good point. And now, as we talked a lot of it sometimes about that mismatch between conscious self esteem and unconscious self esteem. I mean, what if you have this conscious sort of confidence imposturing, but you feel in your gut like you're an impostor.

That's got to be a mismatch. You need to reconcile psychoanalytically. Right. It was funny. I was talking a good friend of mine this morning, and he is literally one of the toughest martial artists on the planet, literally, like widely acknowledged

one of the toughest martial artists on the planet. He's having difficulties in his relationship and we were talking about it, and we're talking about the fact that it doesn't literally matter that he's one of the toughest guys on the planet when he gets in a fight with his girlfriend. He's the you know, the five year old kid who got bullied at home and bullied at school, and he became one of the toughest guys on the planet in

reaction to that. But when he's in that argument, he doesn't feel like a super powerful human being, which he literally is by eddy like any clear measurement device, he's literally a five year old kid. And we all like, we know this. This is that you know Navy seal that famous Greek saying that the Navy Seals live by, which is we don't rise to the level occasion, we sink to the level of our training. And it's because what you know what I mean, I turn up the

norapinefforn in your brain. I make you more fearful and more anxious. Your brain goes, oh problem, I want simple solutions. What worked back when I was five. Okay, let's go for that. And that's essentially what we're up against, right, and that's what we're trying to. Like, so when you talk about confidence, it's not all the stuff you build on top of the like the like broken structure that

you started with. It's literally you got to fix the broken structure you started with, because that's the ultimate weak link in the chain. I love that story with the Marshal artists. I just love that. It was a really crazy I mean, you know, we were laughing about I've known this guy forever, but he's like, he's like, dude, google me. People are scared of me. And yet I was like, I know, So, what is the difference between lower lower eye impossible and capital I impossible? Great question.

My whole career has been spent essentially studying those moments in time when people accomplished CAPITALI impossible. They did what that which has never been done. I did this in in action sports. We've been talking about that, but I you know, even for Wired, in the New York Times magazine,

a lot of those magazines you listed. My beat was be in the room when sci fi idea has become science fact technology, when the first world's first artificial vision implant is turned on and the very first blind person gets to see again, when the first private spaceship leaves Earth, the thing that NASA said was impossible, et cetera. I was in all those rooms trying to figure out, Hey, how the hell is this possible? Right? That was sort of what I was doing. And that's capital I impossible,

that which has never been done. And it turns out that I didn't meet anybody who set out to accomplish capital ie impossible. Right, everybody I met set out to accomplish what I call small eye impossible. And that's what art impossible was really about. Small eye impossible is that which we think is impossible for ourselves, right the end, the end of our expectations for ourselves. Where's our limit?

And this could be growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, man, I want to be a right when I was five years old, clearly, when I was a blue collar steel mill pound, I didn't know any writers and not how you became a writer. I didn't like other than like putting words together. I could even spell, you know what I mean? Like I didn't have I had no clue

it was a small i I possible? Why because there's no clear path between point A and point b. And statistically, crap Odds is six tess right, what is another small I impossible? Rising out of poverty, overcoming deep trauma, becoming world class at anything you do, getting paid for what you love. In fact, I think the first small eye impossible. The longer I've thought about it, I think the first small I impossible And I think almost everybody solves this

one is getting a first kiss. Do you remember when you were like eleven or twelve and you just discovered, you know, that there were attractive people in the world that you might be interested in it? You were like, oh my god, how do I what do I? I mean, like, that's the that's how small I impossible? How the hell do I do this thing that matters so much to me? Right, that's a small eye impossible and the thing that I found over and over and over again. And I'll give

you a story that exemplifies this in a second. But is that the only way you get to capitol I impossible? It is small lie impossible after small ie impossible after small impossible. In fact, when you get to capital impossible, often for the person on the inside doing it, they don't even notice. To them, it's just what's next. They're just having breakfast, They're doing the thing that's in front of them. It's everybody else who's looking at it and

going no way, man. And here's the classic story about this is part of the action sports story. I know it's a psychology podcast, but I think this is a great one. The very first time I talked to Laird Hamilton. I met him. He was thirty three. I was twenty seven. He was just starting to tow into jaws. So at that point he was sort of the widely acknowledged toughest guy on the planet doing the most impossible thing anybody'd

ever seen, towing to these monster waves. And I remember talking to Himbout and he says, Stephen, you know the funniest thing about this is people look at me and they see me on a fifty foot wave and they think, oh my god, Laird, that that is just it's impossible. There's no way I could never do that. It's totally impossible. Like, yeah, they're looking at me, I'm thirty three years old. They see them in this fifty foot wave. They think it's impossible. They didn't see me at three years old on a

three foot wave. They didn't see me at four on a four foot wave, they didn't see me at five on a five foot wave, and they didn't see me last week on a forty nine and a half footwave. So they see the fifty foot wave and think, oh my god, how do you do that? And I think, well, laired, I don't know six inches more than you did. Last week.

Maybe you're not pushing hard enough. That's what it's like on the inside versus all on the ausid And that's what I kept finding over and over and over again, and it'd be really odd, like you people would accomplish it a a possible and some of them wouldn't even notice, you know what I mean, Like growing up in this acts sports community, we're not growing up but reporting on it. It's one thing when you see impossible on TV, when

you or you hear about you read about it. It's another thing when you go drinking with somebody on Friday night and then you get up Saturday morning and go out into the mountains and they do something that, for all of recorded history has never been done and it's not supposed to ever be done. That's a very That's not some dude on a screen. That's just the guy you were out with the night before. That demands a totally different kind of explanation, you know what I mean,

that's no longer Oh my god. You're like, it's sort of in your face in a way that is really like it's a visceral puzzle. You're like, oh my god, I was how does that happen? It's and that's so that there was a different kind of experience of it. Also, it's cool, man, that's really cool. Yeah yeah, I mean, how do you like? What? What have you failed at in your life? Oh? My god? So let's just talk about the experience of writing, because I often think about this.

I think the experience of writing a book is almost constant failure because you write something today, you think it's awesome, You come back tomorrow and you're like, oh, crap, it's not as good as I thought it was. Let me fix it. And you fix it. And then you write something else and you think, oh, this is I got it and nailed and come back the next day and you're like, oh, this is this is just crap, I

didn't do my job. I'll let me fix that. I think writing a book is I mean, I can give you a long list of things that I failed at, but I really think that almost any creative project is the experience of disappointing yourself over and over and over again. And you get it right, but you get it right at the very end, and you know it's not a real right. You know, you're just you're like, Okay, it's done, and I'm not going to look at it for a while.

I'm and turn it in. But you know, if you came back in three months, it wouldn't be done, It wouldn't be right, it wouldn't be finished, because that's the nature of a creator, being a creative project, that little dissatisfied itch. So I think failure in any serious creative life is constant, and I think the same thing is true in any you know, I'm not a scientist PhD by training, but I do science research all the time, and I think science research is also that like how

many things did you think we're absolutely true? That you later some of them you yourself proved yourself wrong? You know what I mean. It's these are both very like I'm bling you must sort of look at your failures all the time, professions. So I mean, I've failed on so many, so many different Like what haven't I failed at is a better question, You're how many best selling books you can fill those? Agreed? Agreed? But I've like I've had books that have vanished into the ether as well, right,

like all that stuff you know we all have. I've had magazine articles that I spent a year working on that got killed at the last minute. You know, that's a that's a crazy thing. You put a year of your life into something and something happens in the news and something you know, the story gets shut down. I mean, over and over and over again. I just don't. I'm

very resilient in that. Like whatever you do to me, I'm going to wake up the next day and I'm going to try to take whatever that crap feeling is and I'm going to try to turn it into words. I'm going to do something. How I process pain in anything is by turning it into works, right and turning into art. So I say this in art of impossible. I think it's really true. Anybody who's accomplished anything really

hard in this life. Your passion is your salvation, but it's where you run to when you need to run. So the good, like I think my life has been shock, a block of failure and so and by the way, I always say, every successful person I've ever met is running away from something just as fast as they're running towards something. And that double motivation is really important. Here's a great, great, great phenomenal driver. It doesn't feel very good, but it's a great motivator. And so if you can

work with it. You can get farther faster for a lot of reasons. Right, you get feareds as focused or free. I always create, Like whenever I write a book, I always have a writing problem in the book that scares me. I'm always doing going after like it's not visible to anybody, you know, from the outside, you would never know it was a challenge, I said for myself. But it's something that scares me because I know I'm going to have a little more focused every time I go to write

because it scares me. Well, it seems like with you have you pair fear with the confidence to still act, the or the bravery? Shall we say to still act? I wouldn't say the fear in it so itself is a great motivator. It usually makes people avoid things unless it's paired also with this additional thing confidence to act like bravery. Yeah, so I like it's interesting because I've had a lot of conversations in and around bravery. Also, bravery is literally you do it in spite of how

it feels. Right. I used to think when I was younger that like courage and bravery meant like you didn't feel the fear, like I was like, God, I don't have any courage. I'm not brave. I'm terrified all the time. And it turns out, no, actually bravery, courage is just about feeling it and doing it anyways. And I'm really

good at that. And the only reason I'm really good at that is because I discovered very early on in my career, in my life that on the other side of my fear are all the stuff I want, all like, all the great joys, all of my superpowers, all of that stuff is on the other side of the fear. That's what I know. So I know that like, no matter how awful it feels, and awful it feels, to go right at it. And it's never easy. And I have no confidence if zero is a very little confidence

going into a lot of that stuff. All I know is that you get to where I want to go. I got to go in this direction. I look at fear as a great gift from the universe. I love that X. The way I talked about it, I've talked about it before is fear's a compass to me, and I think it's a compass to most top performers. And it's for this reason you just sort of figure out.

You're like, oh, it feels terrible, but the thing I really think I want most is on the other side of this, so I gotta there's no there's no actual choice, right because running away from it the shame to me is totally unbearable. The fact that I like, can't like, didn't go at the thing. I don't like. If I fail, I fail. But if I didn't go at it, and I chose to live with that awful feeling, that is really difficult for me. That's I don't think it's confidence.

I think it's that I think living with the fear and the shame is worse, and I know the things I want are on the other side of my fear. This is great. Those two things together it makes a lot of sense. You know, in a lot of ways. A lot of that comes down to like vision, you know, like imagination, you can clearly see what's on the other side. I don't know. I think there's people different their quarity

of vision, so it seems a little bit. That's what you're talking about, is charity of vision, and that is and I think that's a muscle. By the way, I just want to the thing I want to point out with vision, right, And I think you'd agree with me on this is it's you know, imagination whatever we want to call it, creativity. It's a muscle, and you have to train yourself to see a little farther out right. See, I know you've been getting square day. I know about

your workout regimen. You know, I know your coaches, I do. And she's means mean in a good way, but the other she's showing me what's on the other side of fear. Yes, and it's really true. Right, you start pushing through those things. And that's the great I mean, one of the great lessons of action sports also is it's an environment that forces you to confront really basic fears. Speed. The body doesn't like going above certain speeds because bad things happen,

you know what I mean. And you are up against primal forces, but in a sort of controlled environment, like you don't get to control everything, but you can sort of can you can dose it right, You can say, okay, I can expose myself to this much, this much and this munch. And that's you know, there's a whole big chapter in art of impossible want to here's you know, how you go at risk and learn how to work with fear and things like that. I also tell people

you don't want to start here. You don't want like there are five layers, six layers of grit that peak

performers try to train. Here is like the fifth one end that I think people really start to work with because you do want the confidence, right, you're starting You pointed to your muscles, right, you want to if you're training grit and this kind of stuff, you want to start with the physical stuff, very simple, basic physical stuff, because we're physical bodied organisms, and somehow the brain seems to trust that process a little bit more and in

a weird way. So, oh wow, I've got physical grit. Okay, now I can start to develop cognitive grit and then you can sort of move from there. And I think fear is something you're going to have to work with it and negotiate it along the way. But there's a point at which you're like, Okay, now I've got an enough stuff in there to really start training fear. I if you just jump right in and try to go head on at it, I think it's difficult for most people.

I couldn't do it. I don't I know very few people every now and again you meet like a Navy seal guy or an action sports person where you're like, oh wow, you can just go right at that. I don't like, that's super rare in my experience. And that's a personality thing, not personality, doesn't scale. I don't think that's a biological thing. Right, boldness. It's a facet of psychopathy and right. And it also means your D two receptors are hell active. And you know, we could go

on from there. Yeah, you like really getting it under the hood, don't you You know I do? Yeah, No, I know you like that. You know, your discussion of grit in your book is really quite unique. You link things like mindfulness to grit, and you also talk about the dark side of grit. You know, can you just can you talk about some of this because I think in a lot of discussions of grit, you know, a lot of these things aren't really discussed. People seem to

think of grit as strictly like what we would call perseverance, right, industriousness. Industriousness, and they don't like as resilience, for example, is a major component in grit, and resilience has very little to do with industrialness. And you know what I mean, Like resilience is a totally different category of thing. And so what I always say is the first grit school you have to you have to you's got to come in through the body, as we've been talking about, and I'm

not I'm very wary. There's a lot of like the people who are really into embodied cognition and share the inactive vision of perception really tend there's a body chopinism that's sort of floating around, especially in the performance world in the coaching world, to hear a lot like don't even worry about the mind, everything is through the body. I just think that's idiotic. Like I'm a very cognitive dude.

You want to teach me anything, you've got to come in through my brain, like coming in through my body as a resume for disaster, except with this grit skill. So I'm just saying that. But the second thing you have to train is the grit to control your thoughts.

Absolutely the second grit skill, because if you thought without thought control, as we both know, the default mode network, what you call the imagination network, brilliantly is a wonderful ally provided you can get a grip on negative self rumination. If you can't get a grip on negative self rumination, your default mode network is going to kill you literally, right, It is literally going to drive you mad. It is the thing that will drive you mad. So I want

to teach you to be creative later on in the book. Right, that's where it goes. I have to teach you to utilize your default mode network, because, as you know, that's how a lot creativity is going to get done. But I can't teach you that until you have basic thought

control skills. If you're still taking every one of your thoughts personally, if you've got no separation between you know, what you could call emotion and feeling, right, emotion the internal signal and feeling the actual Oh this is sadness

or whatever. You can't get into that gap, you're going to believe every one of your thoughts is real, is true, is accurate, and your brain's going to kick your ass over time, especially if you're trying to go after high art challenges, which is what the Art of Impossible is about. Why their high art challenges there. I just talked about writing a book as a constant experience of failure. You're

wrong almost every day. You fail a little bit almost every day, and you get back up and you put more into it, and at the end you like the high art goal. A lot of people want to write a book. That's a that's a very common high art goal,

and yet the experience is one of constant failure. If I couldn't control my thoughts when I got to the realization every morning that the thing I wrote yesterday that I thought was perfect is actually crappy, and I'm going to have to spend the next two hours rewriting it. That requires, right, It's going to require grit persistence, like

I got to do the work. But if I can't control my thoughts, if I take it personally, if I think I'm a bad person, if I think I'm stupid, if I think I'm a failure, then I've got two problems, right, my bad writing. It's going to require I gotta lead it at my bad head, so I don't with grit skills.

So little of it seems to be about the physical perseverance stuff that people so associated with, and so much with that and a lot of the later grit skills, like the grit to be your best when you're at your worst, and this was really one that was first pointed out to me. I got to give credit work credit was due. Josh Wadeskin was the one who identified this really clearly for me. He was we were talking about all the different grit skills that people should train.

It's like the most important one in my opinion, and you also have to train it independently, and you do and what you have to. It's a confidence thing, like you literally have to create terrible conditions in your life and perform well in those terrible conditions. So you have to trust the confidence that when those conditions show up, you can kick ass right. And it's a different kind of muscle. It's a different kind of confidence. Is that

a physical skill or a mental skill. I'll give you an example of my own life when I'm trying to learn a speech because I don't like I'm good at this stuff, but I'm good at it because I practice a lot. Because I'm actually I'm not that good at it. I'm normally intimidating in a lot of public speaking situations and things like that. And I'm the reason I'm confident is because I practice like mad and I will write a speech, I will do my speech. I will do

my speech in front of friends. I will practice a practice and then THEO. I'll find a day where I didn't get enough sleep the night before, I have worked all day. I'll go to the gym, I'll work out. I'll come home, I'll grab my dogs and I'll go up the mountain behind my house and I'll give the speech. I'm exhausted I usually try to do when I have an E and I feel terrible right, like no blow chugging,

my brain's not working. And if I can give the speech going up a mountain, then I can give the speech under any conditions, which is good because I in my speaking career there have been four or five or six times colossally important big rooms, lots of live bodies, lots of consequences, and things have gone horribly wrong, horribly wrong. Av systems have crashed, flies have gone away. I'm you know, there's no microphone anymore. I'm shouted, you know, blah blah blah.

All those kinds of things happen all the time. Or I'm desperately ill, and you know, was up all the night before because there was some crying infant in the room next to me. You know what I mean? Like whatever it was. Those are tough conditions to be on stage in, and yet I need to know I can constantly deliver. So you got to train that muscle independently, because it's the confidence that you're training. You're not just training the grit to do it. The grit to do

it is. It's one thing to know that you can do it. It's another thing to know that you've done it regularly and you have the confidence that when this stuff shows up in the real world, it's a skill you can rely on. Love it. May I add a grit to facet to all this. Let me know what you think of this. Try it, Try it on, Try it on the T shirt, and let me know if

it fits. So. Paul Tillich, one of my favorite philosophers of religion, who Maslow and the humanistic psychologist Drew a lot On, wrote a really good book, The Courage to Be. Could we add like the grit to be? And what does that mean? What do I mean by that? I mean the In a lot of ways, it's the it's overcoming the fear of death, it's overcoming the the non existence, you know, the idea of the fear of not mattering.

These sort of things. It's a very this is more of an existential grit that I just coined that on the spot. But do you know what I'm saying. I know what what I'm wondering is because the order of the book and the way the biology seems to set up is you want to sort of start with curiosity and go into passion, go into purpose right and you

get to the grit skills later. And my question is, because I agree with what you just said very much, and I'm wondering, does that sort of get covered when you're figuring out what your passion is and what your purpose is like? Isn't that what we use to fight back against the existential dread? Isn't like isn't passion or purpose in a sense the grit to be? And maybe I'm wrong there. I couldn't like, I have no I

think you made a great point. I think you're right, and I'm just trying to like expand on it a little bit. Cool, you know, I love you Your yes ending as they do in improv theater. I don't think it's exactly the same thing, but I'm happy. But I'd like to talk about I want to make sure I talk about passion, that you're you're the star of this

show today. So in my you know, ideas I have, we can table for a second, because I do want to hear your ideas about passion, because you make a really good point in your book the passion is not an overnight process, and you actually like to conceptualize it more as pursuing a few of your intersecting curiosities. So that seems like a lot more manageable way for people to cultivate passion than just the idea of follow your passion that you hear a lot, right, Yeah, I think

people get killed in this. Yeah, and you can send listeners. So we took that portion of the book. We made a really cool interactive PDF out of it, and it's passion recipe dot com. So nice. Anybody can go use that. That's out there. It's free, it's for everybody. But yeah, you know, let me big picture before we even get into the nitty gritty, because this is such a mistake that people make, and it just it's an awful feeling

on the inside. But when I you know that everybody wants passion these days, it's big, it's mystical, and they don't even know why they want it right like, and I mean, why why does passion matter? Because it gives you focus for free Passion is nothing more neurochemically, this is Helen Fisher's work, not my work, than dope mean a norapend effort. It's focus, it's tension, excitement, it's engagement, the desire to make meaning. That's what passion is, right neurochemically,

And what does it gives us focus for free? Well, that's just passion in general. That's any that's passion of an artist, that's romantic passion, that's just passion. By the way, curiosity is a little bit of orapid effort and a little bit of dope mean right when you say you know you stacking curiosity turn it into passion, all you're

doing is really toning up the juice. But all this is besides the point that I wanted to make, which is when people think about passion, if I I say, give me an example of athletic passion or something like that, you talk to me about Lebron James Windmilling in for a dunk over some hapless defender in the finals and right in the fourth quarter is exhausted, there's sweat, dripping off them. That's athletic passion, and you're right, but it's

late stage passion. Passion on the front end does not look or feel at all like passion on the back end, that kind of warrior passion that you're looking at saying I want that. That is a slow build over very long periods of time to get to there. Got to remember the passion on the front end for that windmill dunk is just a little kid in a driveway shooting a basketball through a hoop trying to get it to Faull.

That's what it looks like on the front end. And so we mistake when we're at the front of our journey towards our passion. We mistake what we think we're not feeling on the inside for what we're looking at on the outside and saying it's going to feel like that looks and now it will never feel like that looks on the front end of it. It literally can't you and body passion on the back end. No, on the on the I don't think I'm trying to say, yeah,

look at you. Now, I bring up some things and then you go, oh, that to me, that's passion, right, But you put in the work. That's the end stage. That's the end stage, you know in the beginning, I mean literally in neurobiologically, it does appear that passion is just nothing more than the intersection of multiple curiosities. And what you want to do is you find a thing you're curious about, find another thing you're curious about. Where

do they intersect. I'm really interested in football, I'm really interested in food. Okay, great football is what are the traditional care requirements for football? Let's play around there for a while. That's the intersection, right, Maybe there's something there and you just play there for a little while. Where does that connect with something else you're passionate about? And the reason is simply that curiosity on its own is a powerful motivator, but it's not powerful enough. It won't

endure over time enough. Right, if you can play at the intersection of multiple curiosities, two or three or four things that you really care about, and you put in the work to play the properly. When I say play, I literally mean play, like, go out, talk about it. You want those social bonding neurochemicals underneath it. There's a whole bunch of that stuff that are broken down in the book, But there's a very specific resume for a sort of cultivating passion, but you don't want to mystify it.

Passion matters because it gives us focus for free. You can pay attention with less energy. That's why passion matters. Why does purpose matter? You get more focus or free than you do for passion, right, and you also purpose, which brings into cause better than yourself, gets the focus off yourself, which, as you know, if you're interested in flow, you can't have too much prefrontal cortex ego engagement going on to really drive a lot of flow that gets

in the way. So purpose puts the It expands your focus. You go from an egocentric focus to like a task specific focus much more easily when it's purpose is involved. These are you know, really they sound like purpose sounds like this, I want to purpose and it sounds really selfless, right, You hear it a lot today. But from a peak

performance perspective, it's totally selfish. Having a purpose is unbelievably selfish. Yes, it is great for the world to have a purpose, but from a peak performance perspective, you're getting so much focus for free, so many reward chemicals that drive productivity and performance for free. That's the That's sort of the point in a sense, which is you know you could it could be good for you and good for the world at the same time. That's okay too, synergy great.

So I just want to conclude today's episode with a question for you, Stephen. What are the three things that people can do to be a high performer? Oh? I've been set up, all right, Scott. Well, here's my thing on that one. You have a Stephen has a bit of a b in his bond. I gotta be in my body. It's not so. It's that, you know when this happens a lot when I when I give a speech, somebody stands up afterwards, invariable like and they ask what are the three things I can do Monday morning? And

I usually answer in should we say colorful language? I usually apologize before I use the colorful language, and then I use the colorful language and then explain why and the reason is this peak performance? It's not crazy right by the time you get to the the end of the art in bossible. If you look at it, peak performance is roughly about six things to do every day, seven things to do every week and they vary a little bit, and they're not very long things to do.

You know, one of the things you might want to you need to regulate your nervous system on a daily basis. That means either mindfulness, gratitude, or exercise. Right, gratitude is a five minute gratitude practice. So that's not a big thing to do, That's what I mean. But it's every day, right, it's not. That's why there's no three things you can do Monday morning, because it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, repeat.

Because the real benefits, the benefits we all want, if you're just patient with yourself and show up and just do the work. Don't worry about the outcomes. Your job is to do the work. Do a gratitude practice today, do a you know what I mean, like literally, do the work, don't care about the outcome. Just you do it every day, over and over and over again. Two three four months in these it's exponential growth. Right, So you get these doublings, and the early doublings are almost invisible.

But suddenly you're like, oh my god, I'll give you a really simple Let mean, let me give you a slightly longer answer that makes this really clear. In the book, I talk about something called the habit of ferocity. This is potentially the ability to lean into challenges or or to lean into challenges instinctively and automatically. And it's what I see in peak performers. After they sort of properly cultivate all your intrinsic motivation, there's layer in some goal setting,

some grit skills. You get. This just sort of happens, and I a woulds see it the habit of ferosty. What's the big deal? What does this matter? What is this habit of ferosty? Most people when they encounter a challenge, something that's hard or problem to solve whatever, even if it's something they have a work thing where they got to do it, they've got a bitch about it for five minutes. They're just going to be like, oh God, I don't want to do this, I'm gonna free blow.

And it's only five minutes. But on any given work day or whatever, I encounter about five of those, right, And so if you've got the habit of ferocity and you're just leaning it automatically, the challenge rises up and you lean in sort of before you even think you have time to think about it. You're just in the problem solving it. Say five minutes problem, it's twenty five minutes a day. It's three and a half hours a week, three and a half weeks a year. That's what you

get back. That's what I mean by compound interest. Like people look at people performers and they're like, they're so far ahead of me. How did they get so far ahead? They got so far ahead literally, like five minutes at a time. It's not some giant leap, it's not so miracle. It's literally they've lined up their intrinsic motivators, they've properly

set their goals. They've just got a little more fire, little more internal neurochemistry through very very doable, easy processes, and as a result, when a challenge rises up, they just lean in to meet it and they don't dither around. And the results over a year is you're going to get a month of time back. That's considerable. And that's just one little thing, right, That's what I mean by compounding youst are you going to notice it in any given day? Oh, I say five minutes You know what

I mean? You don't but you notice it when you're three weeks ahead. I hear you. The sociologist Daniel Chambliss wrote a really cool article, The Mundanity of Excellence, looking at Olympic sports people, and he said, it's really quite mundane when you follow their process over a long period of time. But of course it doesn't. That doesn't mean talent doesn't matter. Maybe it's necessary but not sufficient. You know my feeling. You and I think, sure, I think

everybody's grated something. I really do. I mean, yes, I do matters, but I think everybody's great at something. I think it maybe hard could be great. Yeah, I think that's the correct phrase. So yeah, I mean talent is a thing. But you know, both you and I were guys who coming up, people thought we were way behind the curve, right. They didn't think we were out too.

They thought we were behind the curve. I was. I wasn't in the same classes, but I wasn't in a special ed. But I had a sixth grade teacher who told me I wouldn't live to see thirty. I had, you know, I had a bunch of you know, get kicked out of school kind of stuff. So I had that stuff. We seemed to out. You know what I mean, like everyone he's great at something you figured out. Oh, Stephen, you give me chills, man, because I've been told many times a child that it would be impossible to go

to even college. Right, talk about the art of impossible. I got a PhD from Yale, So clearly your theory and research and art and all this it means something and it can inspire a lot of people. So thanks Steven so much for being on the show today. I wish you all the best with the book tour. Thank you, Scott, It's been great hanging out with you. Appreciate it. Thanks

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