- What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to
achieve paradigm shifting, never seen before
breakthroughs consistently? And I thought as a way of
kind of introducing this topic and introducing today, I
would start off talking about where I started with this question. I came to this question of impossibility through an unusual door. I walked into the door of journalism. And in the end of the 1990s,
when I became a journalist, action adventure sports
were a really hot topic. So back then, surfing, skiing,
rock climbing, snowboarding, the like, we're catching
a lot of attention. The X Games were starting
out, the Gravity Games. And back then, if you could write and ski or write and surf or write and
rock climb, there was work. I couldn't do any of
those things very well, but I really needed the work. So I lied to my editors
and I was lucky enough to spend the better portion of 10 years chasing extreme athletes around
mountains and across oceans. And I will tell you that if
you are not an extreme athlete and you spend all your time
chasing extreme athletes around mountains, across oceans,
you tend to break things. I broke a lot of things. And that meant, I got to
take a lot of time off. And what would happen,
is I'd be hanging out and I'd snap this or that. And then I'd have to take
four months, five months off. And when I came back, the
progress I saw was astounding. It was amazing. It was leaps and bounds kind of progress. Stuff that had been absolutely impossible just four months ago
was not just being done, it was being iterated upon. Now, this caught my attention
for a number of reasons. The first is that back in the early 1990s, action adventure sports
was a punk rock pastime practiced by rowdy irreverent people without a lot of natural advantages. So most of the people
I spent my time with, they had very, very little education. They had almost no money and
the vast majority of people I knew came from horrifically
difficult childhoods. Destroyed homes, not just
broken homes, destroyed homes. And yet here they were, on a regular basis reinventing what was possible
for our species, right? Extending the limits of
kinesthetic possibility. I'm not going to linger too
much on action sports today, but I just want to give
you one quick example, so you know what we're talking about. So, surfing is a very old sport. Dates back to 480 AD. And from 480 AD until 1996,
progress was really slow, incremental at best. 25 feet was the biggest wave
anybody had ever surfed. And above that everybody
believed it was impossible. They were physics papers written about how it's impossible to
paddle into a wave over 25 feet and possible a surfer wave over 25 feet. As you can see from this photo today, less than two decades
later, surfers are routinely pulling into waves over
a hundred feet tall. This caught my attention, what
the heck was going on, right? But I also knew, because I had
broken 82 bones at that point that if I didn't take my
question out of action sports and into other places, I was
probably going to kill myself. So that's what I did. And I really took this question pretty much into every domain imaginable. And I wrote a lot of
books about these topics. In "Tomorrowland", for example, I focused on those maverick innovators who turned science fiction ideas into science fact technology. Who did the impossible, of
literally dreaming up the future. In bold. I looked at upstart entrepreneurs, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk. People who had built world changing, impossible businesses in near record time. In "Abundance", the book
that Vija mentioned, teamed up with my good
friend, Peter Diamandis. And we looked at small
teams and individuals who are going after
grand global challenges. Things like poverty or healthcare or energy scarcity or water scarcity. These are things that
just a few decades back had been the sole province
of large corporations and big governments and
yet here were individuals tackling these impossible challenges. So what I discovered in all these domains is that it doesn't actually
matter where you look. You could be talking about
the action adventure sport athletes, you could be talking
about business tycoons. You can be talking about
technologists or artists. It doesn't matter. Every domain you find
ultimate human performance has the exact same signature. It is a state of consciousness, known to researchers as flow. Now you may know flow
by other names, right? You may call it runner's
high or being in the zone. If you happen to play basketball, you might call it being unconscious. If you're a beatnik jazz musician, you're being in the pocket. If you do stand up comedy,
you're in the forever box. Flow is a technical term. And as I mentioned earlier,
it is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness. One where we feel our best
and we perform our best. More specifically, it
refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. We get so focused on the task at hand, everything else just disappears. Action and awareness will start to merge. Your sense of self will vanish. Time will dilate, which is a fancy way of
saying it passes strangely. So sometimes, occasionally,
it'll slow down and you get that freeze frame effect for anybody who's been in a car crash. And more frequently, it speeds up and five hours go by in like five minutes. And throughout, all
aspects of performance, both mental and physical
go through the roof. Now, flow science is actually quite old. It dates back to the late 1880s. Which was the very first
time somebody figured out that an altered state of consciousness, which is what flow is, had a
radical impact on performance. Signs of flow took a huge step forward in the 60's, 70's and
80's, thanks to this man. This is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He is often called the
godfather of flow psychology. He was the chairman of
the University of Chicago, Psychology Department and he conducted one of the largest global
studies on optimal performance anybody has ever done. And he learned three things about flow that are really fundamental. The first thing he discovered,
is that flow is definable. It has seven core characteristics. And I listed some of them
for you a second ago. Uninterrupted concentration
in the present moment, vanishing of self, time
dilation and so forth. And because it is
definable, it is measurable. So we have extremely well
validated psychometric instruments to measure flow at this point. Csikszentmihalyi also discovered
that flow is universal. It shows up in everyone, everywhere provided certain initial
conditions are met. He also discovered why flow is flowy and why it's called flow. So in his giant study,
ran around the world, talking to people saying,
"Hey, tell me about the time "in your life when you feel your best, "you perform your best." And the vast majority, tens
of thousands of people said, "You know, when I'm at my
best, I'm in this state "and every idea, every
action, every decision "flows seamlessly perfectly
effortlessly from the last." So flow is actually a
phenomenological description. It's how the state makes us feel. Interestingly, for the state
to make us feel flowy, right, underneath that, you
actually get a really good shorthand definition of what flow is. For every action, every
decision to lead seamlessly, perfectly, effortlessly to the last, flow has to be as close
to near perfect high-speed creative decision making as we can get. So that's a quick
shorthand way of thinking about what flow actually is. Final thing that
Csikszentmihalyi discovered is that flow is fundamental. Flow is fundamental to wellbeing and overall life satisfaction. In fact, in his study,
he found that the people who score off the charts,
highest in the world, for overall life
satisfaction and wellbeing, are the people with the
most flow in their lives. So after Csikszentmihalyi was done with this kind of foundational work, the next question researchers
turned their attention to was, all right, this is
optimal performance, great. How optimal? What are we talking about? Turns out, pretty optimal. What we now know in athletics for example, is pretty much every gold
medal or world championship that's ever been won, there's
a flow state at its heart. We know that flow in
the arts, in technology, in science accounts for
significant progress, major paradigm shifts. Usually a flow state at the heart. In business, we have some
of the most compelling data. So McKinsey, the global
consultancy, did a 10 year study and they found that top executives in flow are five times more
productive than out of flow. Five times more productive
is 500% more productive. Means you could go to work on Monday, take Tuesday through Friday
off and get as much done as your steady state peers. Interestingly, two days a week in flow, you are a 1000% more productive
than the competition. So think about this for a second. We work with a lot of top organizations, lot of top businesses
that are now starting to incorporate flow into
their fundamental DNA. Anybody who is not doing
this at this point, if employees in flow are a
thousand percent more productive versus company over here
that doesn't have employees in flow, you can see the problem. After this work on how optimal got done, the next question researchers
turned their attention to is where is this coming from, right? And here we've got, huge
boost from technology. So biotechnology is currently accelerating at five times the speed of Moore's law. It is doubling in power every four months. And as a result, we are
able for the very first time to peer under the hood of flow, we can see where it's coming from. This is one example, of
one of these experiments. This is me taking part in an experiment designed by Stanford
neuroscientist, David Eagleman. And I've been hoisted 150 feet in the air, and I'm being dropped into a circus net and I've got a perceptual
chronometer on my wrist. And we're trying to figure out why time slows down in a flow state. And I will tell you,
we were semi-successful in that experiment. It also took about six, seven months of hard chiropractic work till
my neck worked right again. So people, people were injured to bring you this information. What all this neuroscience has taught us is that a lot of our old ideas about ultimate human performance
are very, very wrong. In fact, the most famous
of these old ideas is what's known as the 10% brain myth. This is something you've
probably all heard of. It's the idea that at any one point, we're just using a small
portion of our brain, say 10%. So ultimate performance, aka flow, must be the full brain
on overdrive, right? Turns out, we actually
had it exactly backwards. In flow, we're not
using more of the brain, we're actually using less of the brain. The technical term for this is transient. Meaning temporary,
hypofrontality hypo is h-y-p-o. It's the opposite of hyper. Means to slow down, to
shut down, to deactivate. And frontality is the
prefrontal cortex, right? The part of your brain
that's right back here. And this is an extremely
powerful part of your brain. It handles complex
logical decision making. It handles longterm planning. Your sense of morality comes from here. Your sense of willpower. In flow, this portion
of the brain shuts down. It's actually an efficiency exchange. The brain is trading energy
it needs for attention and it's shutting down
noncritical structures. When it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, all kinds of crazy things happen. Why does time pass so strangely
in a flow state for example? Time, it turns out is calculated all over the prefrontal cortex. And as parts of it wink out,
it can no longer separate past from present, from future. We're plunged into a state researchers talk about as the deep now. Now, the deep now has a
huge impact on performance. If you think about most of your fears, most of your anxieties, very few of them are in the right here right now. They're usually horrible things
that happened in the past that we'd like to avoid
happening again in the present, or they're scary things that might, maybe, could happen in the future, right? And we'd like to steer around it. When we end up in the deep now, when time gets shut down in a flow state, anxiety disappears, your stress hormones flood out of your system. The nervous system actually
resets at this point. Same thing happens to your sense of self. So self is actually a network. It's a bunch of different structures in the prefrontal cortex
that are linked together. And like any network, as parts of it start to wink out, the network collapses. As a result, our sense of self disappears. Again, huge impact on performance. When your sense of self
disappears, your inner critic, that nagging always on
defeatist voice in your head, your inner Woody Allen. In flow, Woody gets silent, right? So we experienced this as
liberation, as freedom. We are actually getting out
of our own way, literally. All right, as a result,
risk-taking goes up, creativity, 'cause
you're no longer doubting every one of you neat ideas, goes up. Now on top of these changes in kind of neural anatomical function,
in flow, we also get a huge boost in neurochemistry. So neurochemicals are
literally nothing fancier than signaling molecules. It's one of the ways the
brain talks to itself and talks to the body, right? And in flow, we get five of
the most potent neurochemicals that the brain can produce. And if you really want to understand why flow allows us to do the impossible, understanding these neurochemicals is key. Now all five of them amplify performance, they boost physical performance. They will do everything
from increased strength to deaden pain, to amplify
muscle reaction time. More importantly, they
impact cognitive function. And if you really want to
understand how Flow can help us do the impossible, you need to understand how the state impacts the three sides of the high performance triangle. And more specifically, how
these five neurochemicals impact the three sides of
the high-performance triangle and that's motivation,
creativity and learning. And I'll start with motivation. So, besides being performance
enhancing chemicals, the five chemicals that show
up in flow are pleasure drugs. In fact of the five, most
potent pleasure drugs the brain can produce,
flow is the only time it appears that we get all five at once. Which is why flow is the most
addictive state on earth. Now, researchers don't like the addictive. It's got negative connotations apparently. Instead, they use things like autotelic, which means, end in itself. Or they say things like
flow is the source code of intrinsic motivation. But when you look at that McKinsey study and you people, find people
500% more productive in flow, this massive boost in motivation, is one of the main reasons why. Something similar happens to creativity. So creativity is really critical, right? It's been called the most important 21st century skill, right? The number one thing we need to thrive in this current century. And it's also a massively
misunderstood concept. So under the hood at a mechanistic level, creativity is fairly straightforward. It happens when the brain
takes in novel information, uses that information to
connect to older ideas and uses those connections
and there's new ideas that it creates to create
something startling, new in the world. That's the mechanism underneath it. Flow, and the neurochemicals
that show up in flow surround this process. When we move into flow, we take in more information per second. So data acquisition goes up. We pay more attention to that information. So salience goes up. We find faster connections between that incoming information and older ideas. So pattern recognition goes up. And we find faster and
farther flung connections between that incoming idea and older idea. So lateral thinking or outside
the box thinking goes up. And on the back end, when we
have to turn those new ideas in something in the
world, when we actually have to innovate from
them, risk-taking goes up. So creativity is surrounded by flow. And as a result, in studies
run by my organization and others, we see that flow can amplify creativity 400-700%. It's a huge spike. Even cooler, Teresa Amabile
at Harvard discovered that that heightened creativity, it can outlast the flow state
by a day, sometimes two. And what does that suggest,
and there's more research that needs to be done and we're
actually running a big study right now to try to poke
at this a little bit more. But it suggests that flow
doesn't just train the brain to be more creative in the moment, it actually trains the brain
to think more creatively over time, over the long haul. The final piece of the
puzzle is learning, right? We live in a very fast paced world. If you want to succeed, you're going to have to speed up your rate of learning. Flow does this for you. So quick shorthand for how
learning works in the brain. More neurochemicals that
show up during an experience, better chance that's going to move from short term holding,
into longterm storage. Flow is this giant neurochemical dump. As a result, in studies
run by the U.S. military on radar operators and snipers, they find that learning rates
in flow will increase 470%. Put this in different contexts. We've all heard about
Malcolm Gladwell's fable, 10,000 hours to mastery. What the research consistently shows is that flow can cut those in half. Now the really good news,
and this is a lot of the work the Flow Genome Project
has helped to pioneer, is that what we now know, is
that flow states are hackable. What we have discovered is
that flow states have triggers. These are preconditions
that lead to more flow. There are 20 of them in total. And I'm going to talk about
all of them in a second. But the first thing you need
to know, is the most obvious. Flow follows focus. It can only show up when
all of our attention is focused on the right
here, the right now. So that's what most of these triggers do. They drive attention into the now. As you can see, there are 20 of them and they come in two flavors. So there are individual triggers. What does it take me to
get into a flow state? And then there are group triggers. This is what creates a group flow state, a shared collective version of flow. And we've all had
experiences with group flow. Sung in a church choir, played in a band, gone to Burning Man,
taken part in a phenomenal brainstorming session where ideas are just flying off the wall, seen a fourth quarter
comeback in football, right? If you saw what the
Patriots did to the Falcons in the last quarter of
the Superbowl last year, perfect example of what group
flow looks like in action. So all 20 of these triggers,
individual and group, all drive attention into the now. For example, the first of the
individual triggers, passion. We hear a lot about passion these days. It's one of these great
buzzwords, very mystical. The only reason passion matters, why passion matters, is we pay more attention to
those things we believe in. Which drives flow, and
flow drives performance. Risk, why did action
adventure sport athletes experience just spike in the 1990s? 'Cause risk levels in
action adventure sports started going through the roof. And risk drives focus, drives flow. So, interestingly, if you're interested in applying these triggers in your life, there's a lot of different ways to do it. And I'm going to talk about flow
in organizations a little bit. 'Cause I think it's a
more interesting topic. Later today we can talk about individual flow a little bit more. So flow in organizations, you can do this in small, medium or large versions. And small, consider Amazon. So in group flow, one of the most potent of group flows triggers
comes from improv comedy. And it's the idea that you always say yes. All right, so if somebody
comes up to me and says, "Steven, there's a blue
elephant in the bathroom." And I say, "Shut up, no, there's not." It's not funny. Nobody's laughing. If I say "Crap, I hope he's not using up "all the toilet paper." You're giggling, right? It's a little funny, I'm
moving in the right direction. Works the same way. So in brainstorming sessions, right? This means ideas have to be additive, they have to lead somewhere. It doesn't mean by the way, you can't critique other people's ideas. You absolutely can, but it
still has to be positive and moving forward when you do. Now at Amazon, group flow is
so important to Jeff Bezos, and it is so easy for
managers in big organizations to say no to ideas, that Jeff
has institutionalized a yes. He has a policy called
the institutional yes. Which is, at Amazon, if you
want to say no to an idea, somebody brings you an idea
and you want to say no to it, you can't just say, no. You also have to write a two page paper and post it on the
internal company website, telling people why you're
saying no, not easy. They make it very hard. Drives a lot of flow at that company. So, to talk about flow in
organizations in a meeting level, medium level, what does it look like when you import a number
of these triggers at once? Really good place to look,
Montessori education. So, 10 years, 15 years ago,
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and a University of Utah
researcher named Kevin Rathunde, went looking for the highest
flow arenas they could find, that weren't in action sports. And one of the things they discovered was Montessori education. Montessori education is
extremely high flow education. And that's one of the reasons
the accelerated learning and the amplified creativity
that Montessori kids, tend to outperform other
children at the same age on every single test you can give them. From intellectual tests, to
social skills, doesn't matter. Montessori education is built around three important flow triggers. The first is autonomy, right? We like being masters of our own ship. We pay more attention to stuff
when we're driving the bus. Montessori education is self
directed learning, right? The kids get to choose
what they're working on. Google's 20% time, right? Where they give employees 20% their time, to work on whatever they want, why? It's a group flow trigger. Or it's a flow trigger, excuse me. The next thing Montessori education has is uninterrupted concentration. It is built around 90-120 minute blocks of uninterrupted concentration. Self directed learning
uninterrupted concentration. Uninterrupted concentration is probably the foundational flow hack. Lastly, deep embodiment, which is just a fancy way of saying I'm paying attention to multiple
sensory streams at once. So what does this look like in education? It emphasizes learning
through doing, right? Don't just read about the
windmill, go out and build one. This will engage your hands
and your eyes and your senses. Pay more attention to it. This also, by the way, leads me to the first flow hack that
I'm going to give you guys. And it's the most important. And when I go into organizations and I work with organizations,
the first thing I tell people is that they can't hang
a sign on their door that says firetruck off, I'm flowing. Can't do this work. So if you work for a
company or you run a company that has policies like emails
must be returned in an hour, or messages must be
returned in 15 minutes, that's a disaster. You are absolutely destroying
the foundational thing you need to create high
performance in the workplace. So in extreme high-performing environments like working with the Navy seals or the action adventure sport athletes, what you see people doing is
literally building their lives around these flow triggers. So with the action sport
athletes, you've got risks, you've also got lots of novelty, complexity and unpredictability. Novelty, they're performing
and living environments always changing, right. Complexity, again, living
environments, always changing. No two waves are the same. The snow pack in Alaska
and a big mountains can morph on a moment by moment basis. Unpredictability. All three of these things, grab attention, drive it into now. Passion, risks, clear goals. All these things are
surrounding the action adventure sport athletes, and more
and more in the 90's. And as a result, huge spike in flow. But it's not just action
adventure sport athletes, any place you see a culture of innovation, Silicon Valley for
example, think about it. Lots of passion, lots
of novelty, complexity, unpredictability, lots of
risk, massive amounts of flow. So a really important thing to know about these flow triggers
is not only do they exist, they're actually really easy to work with. So a couple years ago, my organization teamed up with Google and we ran a six week
joint learning exercise. And we took a team of about
80 different Googlers. And this is from all over the company. So we had people from facilities,
marketing, PR, coders, engineers, and we train them up in four high performance basics. And when I say basics,
I mean, absolute basics. Things like sleep hygiene,
get enough sleep at night. Seven and a half hours
is usually what you need, that sort of thing. And we train them up
in four flow triggers. And after six weeks of training them up, and this was basically about
an hour's worth of homework a day, spread out through the day. So it wasn't one solid chunk. We saw a 35-80% increase in flow. That is a staggering increase in flow. To put it in context, McKinsey
in their original research discovered that most of us
spend about 5% of our work life in flow, often without knowing about it. And if you could increase that by about 15 percentage points, overall workplace productivity
would almost double. Now, this might make our program sound fancy. It's not our programs. It turns out flow is eminently trainable. We are all hardwired
for optimal performance. We have a digital class in fact
called Flow Fundamentalists. That's digitally delivered and
we test pre and post on it. And it was built very, very quickly right after the rise
of Superman was written 'cause there was a lot of
demand and we thought, okay, let's make a digital training who knew. And built fast, put out there. Always kept meaning to redo it. And the reason we haven't,
is testing pre and post the vast majority of
people get a 70% boost in the seventh fundamental
categories in flow. The point is that flow
is eminently trainable. This is very learnable stuff. Now, interestingly, all of this stuff is starting
to move a lot faster. And it is starting to move a lot faster because the four fields that surround kind of states of consciousness and studies of consciousness
and high performance, psychology, neurobiology,
pharmacology and technology are all starting to accelerate
exponentially as well. So psychology, and by this, I mean both the field of psychology,
which is advancing so quickly. 'Cause for the very first time we're using machine learning and big data. So we're sending out surveys and instead of getting
5,000 for 500 responses or 50 responses, we can
get 50,000 responses. So we can get them a lot of information. The other thing that has
changed in psychology is our version of who we are in the world. Our version of our internal psychology over the past 50, 70 years
has undergone a revolution. Think about who we get to be in the world. Go back to the 1950s, and
even though it's a stereotype, it's a fairly accurate one. You had Betty homemaker
on one side, and you have the strong, silent marble
man on the other, right? And those were the boxes most
people had to live in, right. Now we've got 90 different terms for sexuality that people are using. Now we've got Victoria Secret,
transgender runway models, getting standing ovations. Our version of who we
get to be in the world has massively expanded
over the past 70 years. I always point out that
most people don't actually understand how far we've come so fast. So, until 1997, when a
University of Washington neuroscientist named Jaak Panksepp, traced the six primary
emotional pathways in mammals, emotions were not really a
serious topic for science. I know that sounds crazy, but
you could not really talk. You could talk about fear maybe, but you could not talk about
things like wisdom or empathy. These were laughable concepts until 1997, until we figured out where
they were coming from. We've come a huge distance
very, very quickly thanks to advances in psychology. Neurobiology, obviously, gives us the tools to
map and measure, right, what's happening in our
brains and our bodies, when we're experiencing what is often downright inexplicable. Pharmacology, is giving us a whole new suite of tools that are allowing us to experience some of these states
nearly on demand, right? These states of consciousness
for thousands of years were very rare fleeting
occurrences that happen maybe sometimes if you got lucky. Now, we can get them through
pills very, very quickly. And what's coming in,
what's in pill form today will be in technological form tomorrow. And the technological form stuff, we'll talk about in a second. But what's really important
about what's happening in technology, is it's
taking these states to scale. So consider communitas. Communitas is the giant
collective version of group flow. It's what happens when
an entire stadium crowd in a rock concert, all
merges with the music, right? Think about the technology
behind music, right? Think about acoustics and what's happened in the past 50 years. We're taking experiences
that used to be for 50 people around a drum circle, around a campfire. and a 100-200,000 people are
getting to have them at once. This is a radical, radical, radical shift. And the technology is
getting really interesting. So this is transcranial
magnetic stimulation. Essentially it's a radar
operator for the U.S Air Force and she shot a weak magnetic pulse through her prefrontal cortex. In artificially induced
flow, is what it's called. Lasts for about 20 to 40 minutes. Now, to give you an idea
of how powerful this was, they did this crazy study
at the University of Sydney, where they took 46
people and they gave them the nine dot problem to solve, right. Connect, four, excuse me. Connect nine dots with four
lines without taking your pencil off the paper in 10 minutes or less. Very complex creative
problem solving challenge. Requires a lot of pattern
recognition, a lot of thinking. Under normal conditions, less than 5% of people can solve it. In the original study
group, nobody solved it. Then they took a different
group of 46 people, they gave them transcranial
magnetic stimulation. They knocked out the prefrontal cortex. They amplified pattern recognition and creative problem solving, 43% of the people solved
the problem in record time. So, the Air Force has
discovered that radar operators who have to detect fancy patterns
over long periods of time perform better this way. So they're using it
before people go on duty. There are stockbrokers who
are using the same thing before they're going
onto the trading floor 'cause they can spot more patterns. In Silicon Valley,
they're setting up shops where people are doing this, not for what it's doing
for cognitive enhancement, but because it also by
quieting the prefrontal cortex, by turning off the inner critic, by putting us in the deep now, it resets the nervous
system as I mentioned. So it's being used to
treat kind of depression and anxiety as well. Another thing that's happening is we're getting a lot
faster at this stuff, right? So back in the 1990s,
University of Wisconsin neuroscientist, Richard Davidson discovered that Tibetan Buddhists who had 30,000 hours
of cushion time, right, could put their brains in a really radical
state of consciousness. The brainwaves of which
are very similar to flow. 30,000 hours is a long time, right? I don't have 30 hours. I rarely have three hours. 30,000 hours is three
decades worth of work. So it's not really practical
advice for most of us in the real world. What we've discovered is
that we can use these same EEG headsets to record
the brainwave patterns of people who have spent 30
years learning to meditate. And then we can use neurofeedback to train normal people to
move in that direction. And we can compress what
used to take 30 years into about six weeks of training. And this is where we are at today. One of the other cool things, side note, just interestingly, six weeks
is a healthy amount of time. What we've discovered by the way is that even four days of
meditation, just four days of focus meditation, is
enough to start to enhance cognitive function. We've shrunk it down from
30 years into four days. I also, take a picture of this screen. These are things you're going to want. So the top one flow hacks,
if you're interested in flow fundamentals, this is
where you go to check it out. The bottom one is the website
of the Flow Genome Project. So if you go there, there is a free flow
profile on the landing page. Anybody can take it and
it is a tradetology. It basically says if
you're this kind of person, you'll find more flow in these directions. And interestingly, just little research, this has become one of
the, I think it's now the largest study ever
run on optimal psych, about 80,000 people have taken it. And when we first launched
it, we were really sure that the vast majority of our respondents who found had the most flow in their lives and where it would show up, we
thought we were going to look at performing artists and
action adventure sport athletes. We were absolutely certain that was the way it was going to come out. Everything else would
have been ridiculous. Turns out, no. Turns out the vast majority
of people find flow, doing knowledge work, using their brain, being creative, architecture,
coding, writing. Probably what most people in this room do all day long everyday. So I want to tell you why I think all this information matters so much. And to do that, I have
to explain this number. 3:59.4 seconds. So that is the amount of
time it took Roger Banister to run the world's first
four minute mile, all right. And when he did this, it
was an absolute impossible. In fact, there were op-eds
in the New York Times written by doctors who said, you know, besides having a ticker tape parade, waiting for Banister at the finish line, we're going to need a hearse. So people thought it
was going to kill him. It also took forever to run
this first four minute mile. If you look at mile times, they dropped about a quarter second,
quarter second a decade for 60, 70 years leading up to it. But Roger Banister runs
the first four minute mile. And then a month later,
somebody breaks his record. Couple months later, somebody
else breaks his record. In fact, within 10 years,
teenagers had broken that record. So you got to ask yourself,
how is that possible? All right? The physical challenge,
which took us forever 70 years to get to, it
didn't change right? Running a sub four minute mile still requires running a sub four mile. All that changed is the frame, the mental frame, we
built around the task. What used to be impossible,
we suddenly viewed as possible and that somehow made it
a whole lot more possible. This is known to researchers
as the Banister Effect. And what it really is, is
an extremely tight coupling between the mind and the body, right? You have to believe you
are capable of achieving the impossible, before you can actually achieve the impossible. There's just no other way around it. And this is the reason
I've been telling you about flow for the past 40 minutes. And I think this
knowledge puts a wonderful and yet kind of terrible burden
on each and every one of us. Right? Ask yourself what kinds of
impossible grand challenges would you guys go after? Would you solve in your own life? Would you try to solve in the world? If you could be 500% more productive. If you could be 600% more creative. If you could cut learning times in half. This is exactly what is available to each and every one of you today. But what you choose to
do with this information is entirely up to you. But thanks for listening.
tl;dr?
For me it's sensory deprivation mixed with hyper focus
So put on some headphones with rain noise and when I read focus on every letter in every word until I can't focus on anything else... Then bam I'm in flow state
I did a deep dive on this guy's stuff and flow a while ago to see if there was anything there. As a scientist, I can say with conviction that every word that comes out of his mouth is bullshit designed to market himself and his products. He's taking sparse, unconnected anecdotes from studies on a variety of subjects in disparate physiological contexts and trying to say these all relate to some unified flow state.
There is no real sourcing in anything he claims, and any studies he's worked with on the subject have some severe tautological flaws. They are also framed in ways that cannot be disproven by further research. For example, they'd measure performance on some task, and then claim participants that were doing the best on such a task were in 'the flow state'. They'd then conclude after a questionnaire battery that the feelings the high performers experienced- such as focus, loss of time, etc- were inherent facets of the flow state.
Essentially, the only thing of use I was able to glean from my research is that this definition of 'Flow' can most easily be found working on something that isn't too hard to cause frustration or too easy to cause boredom. So it is a resultant state from properly setting goals and environmental parameters, not a causal one that can generate higher performance.
I'm a believer that the flow state is a positive and desirable one, but in my opinion its really just an extension of mindfulness and 'living in the moment'. There is no 'shortcut' to this experience.
Not by watching the seizure-inducing intro, certainly.
I think we complicate the matter of flow so dramatically, it ends up being elusive. If for a minute you table the accompanying feeling of euphoria, being in a state of flow IMO is engaging in an activity you know really well in “autopilot”. I believe it’s a conscious activity you’re engaged in with non conscious effort. So trying to get into flow from the outset is an oxymoron.
Most of us are in a state of flow more often than we realize but we may be doing a mundane non pleasure inducing task. The path to flow is to learn your craft well enough for the non conscious mind to take over and then simply mono-task, another word for mindfulness meditation.
Is this another way to say, find your groove?
In the video (13:47) he states that when you are in a flow state, your body is dumping 5 chemicals at once: Serotonin, Dopamine, Norepinephrine, Endorphins, and Anandamide.
What if we took a pill or a few which had all of these aspects?
this is every where in occulted esoteric knowledge . this journalist is smart . been there done that! 😉
r/positivepsychology