Steven Kotler: How to Achieve Flow, Overcoming Depression, and Building Grit

Can you tell us all how you define flow state?

Yes, and I don't have a definition of flow — science has a definition of flow. So this is not my definition, this is just a lot of people's definition. Flow is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. If I were to take it one level down, it's any of those moments of rapt attention, total absorption — you get so focused on the task at hand that everything else just seems to disappear. Your sense of self will get really quiet, so the voice in your head gets really, really quiet. Time dilates, meaning it passes strangely — sometimes it speeds up and five hours go by in like five minutes, sometimes it slows down and you'll get a freeze-frame effect, like in a car crash. And throughout, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof.

Psychologists take it one level down and say there are six core characteristics of flow. I named some of these a second ago: time dilation, the vanishing of self, complete concentration on the present moment, there's a sense of control — in flow we feel like we're in control of things we normally can't control, so if you're skiing and you're in flow you feel like you can do stuff you've never been able to do before. It's an autotelic experience, meaning it's incredibly enjoyable and we love it, we can't wait to get more of it. And then neurobiologists, which is the work I really do, we define flow by about 20 different characteristics that seem to show up in the brain and the body when people are in flow. But that's sort of the long-chain version of what flow is. There are six characteristics that psychologists define flow by — just keep them a little bit in mind, because as we get to the exercise that we're going to do together later, it's going to be helpful.

Awesome, I love that, super helpful. So one of the stories you told me when we first met that made a huge impact on how I think about you and your work is: when you were 30 years old you were diagnosed with Lyme disease, and you had spent two years in bed. You couldn't even walk across the room. You described it to me as feeling like the worst flu you had ever had mixed with paranoid schizophrenia. You were literally watching yourself decline, you were maybe functioning 30 minutes out of the day, and your depression was getting so strong you were thinking of ending your life. And I'm going to pass it over to you to tell us what happens next.

Well, you realize I was drunk at the time I was telling you these things, so they might not have been true. Okay, so let's just level set there now.

[laughter]

Thank you very much, hi everybody, it's really nice to see you guys. It's nice to be with you. I see a lot of familiar faces in the stream, so hello everybody, happy new year.

So yeah, as you pointed out, I was in bed for a very long time. I was very, very sick, I was functionless, and I was very suicidal. It was no longer "if," it was a "when." And a friend of mine showed up at my door and she wouldn't leave, and she wanted to take me surfing. And it was laughable, right? As you said, I couldn't walk across a room. I was in so much pain, my brain wasn't working, and the last thing you want to do is be out in the waves without a brain — it's a bad combination.

And she wouldn't leave. I was exhausted, I could barely — anything to get her out of my apartment. And finally after like hours I was like, you know what, let's go surfing today, I can always kill myself tomorrow. I mean, what's the worst that can happen, right?

So then they literally had to carry me. It was her and my neighbor — they carried me into the car, loaded me in, and drove me to Sunset Beach. If you've ever been to LA or surfed in LA, you know Sunset Beach is like the wimpiest beginner wave in the entire universe, super friendly. It was summer, the tide was out, so we waded out to the lineup — they had me hooked by one arm and carried me out. They gave me a board the size of a Cadillac, and the bigger the board the easier it is to surf.

I was out there 30 seconds and a wave came. And it had been like five years since I had surfed, but muscle memory — I spun the board around before I knew what I did, I paddled twice, and I popped up to my feet, which was probably all the energy I had in the entire universe for the entire month basically. At that point I spent it on that moment, and I popped up into a dimension that I didn't even know existed.

I felt like I had panoramic vision, I could see out of the back of my head. Time had slowed to this absolute crawl. And the weirdest part about the whole thing is I felt awesome. I mean, physically I felt awesome, but emotionally I felt awesome. I had been suicidal, beaten down, and suddenly I was filled with life and excitement and possibility, having this crazy altered-state experience. I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know at the time these states were called flow states, because it was the late '90s and it wasn't really a common term at that point.

I caught four more waves that day, and by the fifth wave I was disassembled. They took me home, poured me into bed basically. And for two weeks people had to bring me food because I couldn't get out of bed to make it to my kitchen to make a meal. And on the 15th day I caught a ride back to the ocean, did it again, had this crazy altered-state experience, felt better while I was surfing, felt terrible afterwards, and kept doing it.

This is the autotelic nature of flow — it's such a big high, so powerful, we'll keep going back to it despite the cost. And in the beginning the cost to me was immense. I'd go surfing for like an hour and I'd be in bed for two weeks. But it was somehow worth it. And of course, about eight months later, I went from 10 percent functional to about 80 to 85 percent functional, and the only thing that was happening differently was I was going surfing, having these very powerful altered-state experiences, and I didn't know why.

Flow is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions, so first of all, what the hell was going on? Why was that happening? Lyme is only fatal if it's in your brain, and I'm a science guy, I'm a rational materialist. I don't have mystic experiences out in the waves — and what's flakier than that? So I was really convinced that I was having these experiences because the disease had gotten into my brain and I was dying.

So I went on a giant quest to solve these puzzles — like, what the hell is going on with me, and am I actually dying? And what I discovered is: whoa, these states have names, they're called flow states. This was right at the beginning of where people were doing the first sort of neuroimmunology on flow. And a guy named Herb Benson, who was at Harvard, had sort of mapped the neurochemistry of the flow cycle, the process that it goes through in the brain.

He had pointed out that as we move into flow, there's a global resetting of the nervous system — basically all the stress hormones are flushed out of your system. And Lyme is an autoimmune condition, which is your nervous system going haywire. So flow has been very spectacular over the years for a lot of people trying to heal autoimmune conditions. He pointed out that this mechanism of the nervous system getting reset, plus all the neurochemicals that make flow so autotelic — they're all pleasure chemicals, the reward chemicals, but they all do double duty by boosting the immune system. So he thought this very mechanism that healed me was present in most so-called cases of spontaneous healing.

Which sounds like it's massively overstating the case, at least then, but I was like, whoa, okay, at least I know where this is coming from and why. And I quickly figured out, because I had been studying essentially the subject of what the new book is about — people who were accomplishing the impossible over and over and over again — and they were all describing flow experiences along the way. And I very quickly put it together that the same thing that got me from subpar to normal was helping normal people go all the way up to superman. And that was sort of where all this started for me.

Wow, I mean I love that story so much, and thank you for telling it with everyone. It's so powerful, so thank you for going there.

Before we get into your new book, I want to talk about The Rise of Superman. It's literally my favorite book. I have it in paperback, it's so ratted and underlined. I used to take it with me on every big ski race and I would read it the night before when I was really nervous, because it's case study after case study of action sports athletes achieving the impossible — it's Danny Way successfully leaping with his skateboard over the Great Wall of China, or people surfing hundred-foot waves, or Shane McConkey base jumping off a thousand-foot cliff in Switzerland. So what is it about action sports athletes that taught you about flow, and how can people that are not throwing themselves off mountains relate to what you learned?

So the thing that you have to understand about action sports — because I was studying action sport athletes, I was writing about them, I was living in the valley, these were friends of mine. And the other half of what I was doing was studying neuroscience and psychology and trying to figure out how the impossible was possible.

What was so amazing — and now it's a very different thing, and you know this, Langley, because you've been there and you've seen it up close — but it's one thing when you see Laird Hamilton on a screen or Shane on a screen and they're far away. But these were my friends. Like, I'd go drinking with people on Friday night and then we'd wake up Saturday morning hung over and we would go into the mountains and they would do something that, for all of recorded history, had never been done before and nobody believed was even possible. That's a very different view. That's a view where you're like, "what?"

And what made it even more emphatic, I guess, is in the '90s, action sports — this was rowdy, irreverent, really subcultural, really punk rock almost. Everybody I knew across the board came from really bad childhoods, horrific — not just broken homes but destroyed homes. They had almost no money, they had very little education. There was tremendous amounts of drugs, alcohol, and risk-taking.

So normally, if you take a group of people and you say there's lots of drugs, there's lots of alcohol, there's lots of risk-taking, there's no money, there's no education — you don't end up with a group of people who routinely are redefining the limits of possibility. You end up with a group of people who are going to jail or are going to die young. And yet that was weird, right? That was very everyman. It was like — now we think about Shane as "oh my God, Shane McConkey" — but there was a time when Shane was just the goofy guy who lived down the street, who was just a little funny. He was an amazing skier but it's a different view at the front end of it.

So it really begged an explanation, because it wasn't "oh my God, action sport athletes." It was "holy crap, if these guys can do it, maybe I could do it." And maybe other people can do it. Like, what the hell is going on here?

And what we learned — and what we've learned since — and by "we" I'm talking about the Flow Research Collective, which is the organization I run where we study the neurobiology of peak performance, but really I'm talking about a huge field of flow researchers. There's a European association of flow scientists, over 100 scientists thick. There's a lot of people who work on this.

But the whole field figured out that flow states have triggers — preconditions that lead to more flow. And because we were working on the neurobiology, the difficulty that we'd had with flow and training flow up to this point was that people knew the psychology, and psychology is a metaphor. When most people — Peter Diamandis, my partner in a lot of my books, uses the term "mindset" in every other sentence. Peter essentially means attitude towards life. When psychologists say mindset, they mean attitude towards learning. When neurobiologists say mindset, they mean: if you have the right attitude towards learning, these parts of your brain get active when presented with novel information and these parts don't. There's very specific mechanisms.

Neurobiology is mechanism. If you get to the mechanism, suddenly an elusive weird experience becomes reliable and repeatable. That was the big breakthrough — figuring out that flow states have triggers, these preconditions that lead to more flow. And what we discovered is it's not just the action sport athletes, it's literally any culture of innovation.

So this could be the Summit community, right, especially when you guys were first starting out — huge culture of innovation. This could be Silicon Valley, not so much present day maybe, but 10 years ago, 15 years ago for sure. San Francisco, the birth of the internet, right, that was going crazy. Seattle during the grunge rock movement. Take your pick. Whenever you see a culture of innovation, you see a culture that is built around flow's triggers.

In fact, to take it one step further — into something really prosaic, like business — skunk works, which is essentially an isolated innovation factory, has been, since Lockheed Martin invented the idea in the 1940s because they were trying to build planes to outpace the Nazis, it has been how every company in the world has innovated. Whether it's Apple or Walmart, take your pick, everybody builds a skunk works. You go back and they do it in a precise way. If you go back to the original, there are 14 rules for how to build a skunk works. They're essentially rules for flow triggers. These are high-flow conditions.

Any time we do innovation at an extreme level, flow has to be part of the equation. Flow is how the brain innovates. And whenever you see a culture of innovation, it doesn't matter who it is or what it is, you're seeing a culture where — there's other things going on — but you're seeing a culture where there's a lot of access to flow. There's other things in the equation, right? The Art of Impossible is a book about how flow is necessary for achieving anything great, but it's not sufficient. There's more going on — it's a slightly bigger toolkit. And we can talk about that later if you want. But anyways, I'm going to shut up now and let you ask another question.

So talk to us — The Art of Impossible, it's coming out January 19th, so very close. How is The Art of Impossible different from your other books?

So first things first, it's a how-to, right? I mean, ever since I wrote my first book on flow, which was West of Jesus — you might be right, Langley, 2006 maybe — people have been wanting me to write a how-to, like an actual peak performance primer. And I've said, look, I'll write a how-to when the science catches up with the how-to needs. That's how I do my work.

So what has happened is the science has caught up. Let me sort of tell the story of where the book came from, because I sort of led up to almost the beginning. We discovered these flow triggers, and if you go back to the '90s and look at how people were trying to train flow, they sucked. I mean, they sucked. The best in the world — Susan Jackson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, godfather of flow psychology — Susan Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi wrote Flow in Sports. That whole book is about how they tried to use flow with athletes and tried to train athletes in flow, and it sucked basically. They weren't very good at it.

And that changed once we figured out the triggers and the neurobiology. But something funny happened right afterwards, which is: it is remarkably easy, actually turns out, to train up flow. That's actually fairly doable. In fact, we use Susan Jackson — the woman I just mentioned who couldn't do it in the '90s — we use her very test for flow. It's the best, still the best one out there, to measure flow pre and post. And the Flow Research Collective, we train on average about a thousand people a month, so it's one of the world's largest kind of neurobiological peak performance training institutes out there. So we have a huge data set to work with.

And what we started to realize is: wow, we can get a 70 to 80 percent increase in the amount of flow in your life. That's not actually that hard to do. But what happens is, if I train you up in flow — and this was early on, before the Flow Research Collective, based on the triggers — you'll get a huge boost in flow and it's going to last about a month, maybe two, maybe three. And then you're going to crash.

And if you're selling flow trainings and you're giving people a lot more flow and then suddenly it's going away, you have very angry clients. That was starting to happen, and it was a puzzle. And when we started to really talk to all our customers about what the hell was going wrong — flow amplifies an enormous suite of skills. So what do you get in flow? Increases in motivation, grit, productivity, accelerated learning, amplified all aspects of creative problem solving, all aspects of collaboration. You get more empathy, some other physical stuff, but that's the core of it.

And what we started to realize is: holy crap, if these skills that flow is amplifying — if you don't have them, what happens is it's like a car that has bicycle tires. And as long as the car is driving around at 25 miles an hour, it's great, it's a perfect car for you, you love the car, it goes great. Flow is 500 miles an hour. And if you amplify everything to 500 miles an hour, those tires aren't going to work.

So for example, grit skills — really simple one — but if you don't have grit training and you haven't built up the proper layers of grit, when flow goes away, what the hell are you going to rely on? Flow may amplify grit and it may make you grittier — and it does, massively — but it still goes away. The feeling goes, you're going to come down, and then you're going to have to do the same stuff without the flow.

The Art of Impossible is a book — I'm a writer, I like to do fancy things with language, I don't like to write how-to books, that's not my thing. And to write one that's fun and compelling and super interesting — this book took five years. I wrote this book start to finish five times along the way. And I can tell you that other than the introduction, I was not in flow for any of it. This is one I did for everybody else. It wasn't a flowy experience for me — it was a gritty experience. It required a lot of motivation, a lot of grit. That's going to happen in everybody's life.

So if you don't have the motivation skills — motivation, by the way, I'm going to use the term, but it's a catch-all for internal motivation, external motivation. External meaning like money, sex, fame. Internal: curiosity, passion, purpose, et cetera. Grit and goals — that's what psychologists mean when they say motivation, they actually talk about all those things. So it's a catch-all for those skills. But if you don't have those skills in place, I can massively amp up your motivation and productivity when you're in flow, but you can't stabilize it when you're out of flow, and you can't produce these results over time.

So the book came out of: hey, there's a bunch of other things that have to get trained up. That was step one. Step two was, because flow is the big picture, it gave me a perspective that other people in peak performance didn't have, which was: holy crap, these are all related. This is a system. We're looking at a biological system. And I always say peak performance is nothing more than getting your biology to work for you rather than against you.

What we've learned in the past five years is that it's a limited set of things and it's designed to work in a specific order in a specific way. And I think most people — and probably most people listening to this, because Summit is not a lightweight group of people — if you're in this room, chances are you're something of a peak performer, you're doing stuff. So you'll read The Art of Impossible and your experience is going to be: oh yeah, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I didn't know about that, I didn't know about that, I didn't know how this tied in. But some percentage of the book is going to be the stuff you're doing, because there's a limited set of tools.

And what I always say is, along the way there have been phenomenal books — Angela Duckworth's book on grit is amazing, there have been great books on focus or gratitude or mindfulness, these are all terms you guys have heard, or flow, I even wrote some of those books. This is the first time somebody, I think, put it all together and said: wait a minute, this is one system. It's a sequence, it's designed to work in a specific order, and anybody can do this. That's the whole big point.

And I always say, this was true with the action sport athletes and this was true when I went into business and studied business people who were taking on impossible global challenges, building amazing companies in record time. It was true when I was covering all the people I spent years covering — those moments where sometimes science fiction ideas became science fact technology, the impossible of dreaming up the future. I was in every one of those rooms. You're seeing the same skills over and over.

This is the first time it's organized into a system and it's meant to be done in a specific way to get maximum effect. It's not that you're doing it wrong — it's that there's a couple other pieces to the system, and if you get it in the right order, you just go farther, faster.

And I always say that achieving the impossible — and by the way, it's called The Art of Impossible, caveat, let me define terms for a second. We started with flow, here's the other term you should know. The book is lessons learned from people who've accomplished what I call capital-I Impossible — that which has never happened before. This is Shane McConkey doing that which we've never seen before. Take your pick. But it's really for anybody who's interested in small-i impossible, and that's stuff we think is impossible for ourselves.

The example I like to give in the book is: I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, blue-collar steel mill town in the '70s. I wanted to be a writer since the time I was like four or five years old. I didn't know any writers, I didn't know how to become a writer. It was like I woke up one day and went, "Mom, Dad, tomorrow I want to be an elf." There's no clear path between point A and point B, and statistically really crap odds of success. That's small-i impossible.

Overcoming deep trauma is a small-i impossible. Getting paid doing what you love is a small-i impossible. Becoming world-class at anything is a small-i impossible. I think the first small-i impossible we all go after is when we're little kids, we're 10, 11, 12, and we're suddenly discovering, oh wow, there are other people in the world that I'm attracted to. How do you get that first kiss or that first boyfriend or girlfriend, whatever your preference? That's a small-i impossible we all sort of had to tackle. It's a thing where we were like, oh my God, I would do anything for this, but I don't know how to make it happen. That's what the book is designed to be used for. It's a system anybody can do, anybody can use, anybody can massively level up their game and significantly exceed their expectations.

All right. So I only get one more question before we move into the exercise — we've flown through this. I was listening to your new podcast, which I love by the way, preparing for this. And I love what you said — that you've learned from the last 30 years in positive psychology that the most important thing is that other people matter. Your social support matters. I was a little surprised that you say this because you're such an introvert.

Oh, you didn't — yeah, you didn't hear me say it. You actually heard Chris Peterson say it. Chris Peterson was a positive psychologist at the University of Michigan who I was quoting. But he said you could sum up 30 years of positive psychology in the phrase "other people matter." I think he's a little overstating the case, but he's not wrong, and in really subtle weird ways that people don't understand. But I'll shut up and let you ask your question, then I'll weave that into the answer.

Well yeah, just as a community builder myself, I wanted you to expand on that. Why do other people matter? Why does social matter?

So when we talk about positive psychology basics, there are a bunch of things they've come up with. And there's three things on the physical side of the equation — you want enough energy to meet the challenges of the day. What the research has shown consistently, and these are sort of non-negotiables, you need three things: you need seven to eight hours of sleep a night, you need good hydration and good nutrition (and it's different for everybody, there's no diet that's worth recommending), and you need social support. These are all on the physical side.

And what I like to tell people is, what it seems like experimentally is that you can screw one of these up a day and still perform at your best. Don't make a habit of it, but if you don't get enough sleep at night, if you're good on hydration, good nutrition, good social support, you can still get to peak performance, you can drop into flow. But you really can't not do this on a regular basis.

And so it's a number of reasons. Here's the obvious: we've all — think about what happens in your life. You get in a fight with your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, sister, brother, boss, whatever. Think about how much energy you don't have the next day at work, how distracted and low-energy you are. That's just the simple version of it.

The more profound version — what most people don't realize is every time we have a challenge, anytime anything is a little bit off balance, your brain makes a fundamental risk assessment. It says: how, what's it going to take to solve this challenge, are you prepared to meet this challenge? And part of that risk assessment gets done in the part of our brain that's saying: do you have any social support? Because if you've got to solve a problem and you're going solo, it's a big problem. You've got a posse around to help, it's a lot less of a problem.

And it's even distant — you don't need a huge robust network. You need a couple people who have your back so you feel safer and more secure. And this is literally — anxiety blocks performance, period, pretty much. A little bit helps you learn, helps you focus, but it's a little bit. Once you get above that, you're sort of screwed. It really blocks foundational things that you need for performance. So this is about regulating your nervous system and letting your nervous system know that you're just not a solo act.

And this is doubly important, given the year we've all had. And by the way, I'm an introvert and I don't even like people that much, and this is still super important to me. I don't like people that much, and yet every day I'm going to make sure I have one good conversation with my wife, or try to, and I'm going to make sure I have one good conversation with a friend, even if it's five minutes long. Just: hey, I love you, got your back, you got my back, cool, okay, let's go deal with our day kind of thing. It's different for everybody — maybe real extroverts might need a lot more than an extreme introvert like me, and you really got to run that experiment for yourself. The social support really matters.

And I think at a higher level, part of what you guys are doing here by trying to pair people up in groups of five with peers — so amazing. One of the reasons is, you've heard the saying that you're the sum total of the five people you spend the most time with. One of the things that's really important about that is other people set our possibility space for us.

I think one of the main reasons I got as far as I got in my career is because Peter Diamandis is one of my best friends, and Peter has literally the stars as his goal. He's taken us into space. He's got no limits on his thinking. So you can't work with a guy like that for 25 years and not — you know what I mean? You're like, okay, well if he's doing that, what the hell, you know? It's the same thing with Shane McConkey — these guys weren't just my friends, you're like, well okay, you're doing that, what can I do?

And it's not a big deal because it's somebody on a screen — it's somebody in your immediate network who you can turn to for advice. But part of that is just social support. I have a posse, you've got my back. That's so foundational to everything. But part of it is we've got an upper limit — this is the threshold on what I think is possible for my life, and that's a serious threshold. That's a brake on how far you can go.

And so having more people around you who have done similar things and gone farther in different directions — hugely beneficial, because they set the possibility space for your life.

Yes, I love that. Thank you, Steven.

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