E58 - Steven Kotler: Achieve Peak Performance, Find FLOW & Do The Impossible
Know Thyself
André Duqum
4.8 • 658 Ratings
🗓️ 8 August 2023
⏱️ 99 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Steven Kotler reveals the secrets to achieving peak performance and discovering the transformative power of flow. He shares his insights behind what flowstate is, whether it's the same as a meditative state, and how we can train ourselves to experience it regularly. He discusses procrastination, dopamine addiction, and why clarifying our passion and purpose in life is essential for achieving our dreams.
Steven describes the 4 stages of flow, and how we can engineer our environment to provide the ideal space to experience it. He also dives into the mystical side of flow, and explores the mystery behind what it actually is.
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Timecodes:
0:00 Intro
2:15 Is Flowstate a Spiritual Experience?
8:10 Defining Flowstate
9:34 Using Your Procrastination for Optimal Performance
13:57 Why Breaking Dopamine Addiction is Essential, and How to Do It
17:52 Clarifying your Passion and Purpose to Motivate You
22:21 Combining Passion & Purpose and Stacking Motivation
26:03 The One Mistake Everyone Makes on Purpose
32:09 How to Turning Work Into Play
41:56 Learning New Things: Conscious Competency
53:46 Micro vs Macro Flow: Flow in Our Daily Life
1:00:25 4 Stages to Achieve Flowstate
1:01:55 Setting Up Your Environment for Flow
1:09:29 Manicuring Your Internal Space for Flow
1:19:26 Group Flow: Maximizing Creativity with Others
1:25:12 The Mystical Side of Flow
1:36:40 Conclusion
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Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. He is the author of 11 bestsellers (out of fourteen books), including The Art of Impossible, The Future is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 50 languages, and has appeared in over 100 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, TIME, and the Harvard Business Review.
A lifelong environmentalist and animal rights advocate, Steven is the cofounder of Planet Home, a conference/concert/innovation accelerator focused on solving critical environmental challenges, the cofounder of The Forest + Fire Collective, a network of individuals, organizations and institutions dedicated to ending catastrophic wildfire and restoring forest health to the American West. Alongside his wife, author Joy Nicholson, he is also the co-founder of Rancho de Chihuahua, a hospice care and special needs dog sanctuary.
Website: https://www.stevenkotler.com
Books: https://www.stevenkotler.com/books
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevenkotler/
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Know Thyself
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I have spent my career with people who have done the extraordinary. They all started out ordinary. |
| 0:06.4 | To perform it your best, what are the basics? Flow states are not binaries. You're not in the |
| 0:11.6 | zone or out of the zone. It's actually a four-state cycle. It's an optimal state of consciousness |
| 0:16.4 | where we feel our best and we perform our best. Flow is so joyous, so addictive, so pleasurable, so much of our best feeling on Earth, |
| 0:24.2 | that once an activity starts producing flow, we automatically go back to that. |
| 0:28.9 | Let's talk about the simplest things people can do if they want more flow in their life. |
| 0:33.0 | What do you make of when you turn that macro flow dial up to 11 and those states of consciousness become so |
| 0:39.9 | rapturous that mystical things start happening. Flow can explain synchronicity. It can't explain |
| 0:46.5 | serendipity. It allows you to sort of get closer and closer and closer to these really interesting |
| 0:52.1 | mysteries. There's nothing special about the people who do |
| 0:56.1 | really special things. We're all capable of so much more than we know. |
| 1:06.0 | Hello, beautiful beings. Welcome back to the Know They Self podcast for every single week. |
| 1:10.2 | We get the honor |
| 1:10.8 | and privilege to sit down with a brilliant mind, beautiful soul to sit down and see what we can |
| 1:15.5 | learn more about ourselves in the world around us at deeper and deeper levels. My guest today |
| 1:19.5 | is a New York Times bestselling author, author of many incredible books such as Stealing Fire, |
| 1:24.6 | The Art of Impossible, The Rise of Superman, and New Book NAR country. |
| 1:28.5 | He is an award-winning journalist, and he is the founder and executive director at the Flow Research |
| 1:33.2 | Collective. And he is an individual that is a world-class leading expert at the human |
| 1:40.1 | high-performance state of consciousness known as Flow. Stephen Kotler, thank you for coming on the show, |
| 1:45.2 | my friend. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. People tune into this podcast because they're trying to |
| 1:49.3 | become the best, most self-realized, actualized version of themselves. And there's this Taoist |
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