Andrew Skotzko

I am thrilled to start the new year in this conversation with David Kadavy, an author and thinker who has profoundly shaped my thinking as a creative person over the last ten years since his first book, Design for Hackers, taught me the fundamentals of graphic design when I was a wet behind the ears computer programmer.

David is a prolific author, podcaster, self-publishing coach and speaker who has published 7 books and 281 podcast episodes so far.

This conversation covers a ton of ground, sharing his journey from the midwest to Silicon Valley to Latin America, across four books, multiple startups, and speaking around the world. David’s commitment to following his curiosity inspires me and he shares real wisdom in here about thinking about the impact you want to create with your work and navigating the existential challenges of a creative life.

Enjoy!

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The end of the year is typically a quiet time where we turn inwards. I wanted to briefly drop in, wish you well, and share a simple approach to closing out the year.

We’ve made it though another unprecedented year of change. I saw a funny tweet about this the other day that hit home – it said something like, I’m definitely ready for some good ole “precedented times.” Enough of this unprecedented stuff!

That resonates with me for sure. I don’t know about you but I’m 110% ready to close the books on this year. For me, 2021 was a much harder year than 2020. I’ve heard that from many friends also. While a year of great challenge, it was also a year of incredible growth. This one had alllll the feels: joy, love, heartbreak, curiosity, sadness, confusion, hope. And so much more.

But as hard as this year and the pandemic have been, I still have a deep faith that humanity will metabolize this into a net-positive experience. Wherever this finds you, I wish you a healing and rejuvenating holiday season and transition between years.

I used to think that doing an end of year review was too formal or stodgy, or that it was a formality. After all, the end of year—it’s an arbitrary deadline! It’s not even a real thing, except by virtue of societal agreement. So I didn’t start doing an annual review until a few years ago, but since then I’ve found it to be an amazing practice. I first did one at the end of 2015 and it was a holy shit kind of moment, where I got smacked in the face with some truths about my life that I had avoided facing.

It’s an easy thing to get overwhelmed with—or feel like it’s not worth the effort. I totally get that, and almost skipped it this year myself. My energy levels have been slowly recovering over the last two months. So I ended up simplifying my process, which I’ll talk you through in a second to provide some simple scaffolding.

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Whether you do this, or just take some quiet time for yourself, my wish for each of us is that we complete and release whatever we need to in order to step into 2022 from a posture of possibility. At a minimum I hope you take some quiet time to nourish your soul and reflect.

One book that I highly recommend for this period of time is called “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.” I just read it, and immediately started reading it a second time. It’s that good.

Alright, let me talk you through this simple approach to close out the year, and then let’s all get on with it.

It’s a simple 3-step process.

• Complete: Remember + review
• Center: Reflect + recharge
• Create: refresh your intention going

The part that I’m going to be prescriptive about is the “Complete” step, which can be done in an hour or two tops. It’s going through a set of questions and reviewing what happened in your life over the last year. For centering and creating—or recharge, reflect, envisioning, whatever words you want to use—there are a million ways to do it. If you don’t have an approach that works for you, I’d recommend some quiet time in nature, some journaling, and setting up a long conversation with an inspiring friend to brainstorm together about what you want to bring forward next year.

Let’s get into it.

As the end of the year approaches, many of us are thinking about what changes we want to make. How we want to approach life and work differently going forward.

For better and worse, over the last decade I’ve probably obsessed more than most about workflow, productivity, and flow.

I recently had a conversation with a friend where we were talking about flow, creativity, and how to up our individual creative performance. We both work in leadership roles with technology teams, so we end up spending a lot of time changing contexts, zooming in/out, collaborating with others, while still trying to find a way to do our own deep work. A very common challenge in modern knowledge work.

He asked me how I thought about flow and setting up my day to get more creative output, and it turned out to be useful so now I’m sharing that here. I get asked this a lot, so hopefully going forward I can just point people here when asked.

This is about generating more flow and top-quality creative output in your life.

At a high level, we’re going to talk about two things:

1. What is flow, and why should we want more of it in our lives?
2. How do we get more flow in our lives?

As we go through this, I’ll attempt to distinguish between the principles of flow that apply anywhere, and provide specific examples of how I have implemented these principles in my life so you have something to go off of.

Let’s get into it. We start with understanding flow itself.

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What is flow?

Flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness, where you feel and perform at your best. This concept comes out of the world of positive psychology, and the godfather of flow is the late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, may he rest in peace. He was a true gem and contributor to humanity.

If you’ve ever felt “in the zone,” and totally lost track of time during an activity, that’s flow.

There are four hallmarks of flow, and they are captured in the acronym STER:

• Selflessness
• Timelessness
• Effortlessness
• Richness (sensory)

Said another way, four big things happen in flow:

1. Action and awareness merge — you become one with the moment
2. Your sense of self and self-criticality goes away
3. Your sense of time distorts — either speeds way up or slows way down
4. Mental and physical performance skyrockets

If you’re curious about what’s happening in your brain in flow, there are two main things I’ll highlight.

First, your brain goes into a state called “transient hypofrontality.” This means that for awhile, parts of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) quiet down and self-criticality goes away.

Now, on a neurochemical level, flow is a crazy chemical cocktail of:

1. dopamine
2. serotonin
3. anandamide
4. norepinephrine
5. endorphins
6. and sometimes oxytocin, especially in group flow situations

That’s an ultra-addictive mix of the same neurochemicals released by the following drugs: cocaine, MDMA, LSD, marijuana, speed, and sex…

I hope this finds you happy, healthy, and thriving wherever you are! It’s been TWO YEARS now that this podcast has been alive in the world (first ep dropped Nov 5 2019). And it’s been almost four years since I first started thinking about the podcast idea after a New Year’s Day brainstorm around a friend’s kitchen table.

That blows my mind. It’s been a rewarding and challenging journey so far.

Looking back on the second year of the podcast, I want to talk about three things:

1. Six lessons learned in year two
2. Some of my favorite episodes in year two, and what most impacted me from them
3. Show updates going forward

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Lessons from year two of the podcast

Lesson 1: Start then learn

I wish I’d started the podcast sooner. This is one that pretty much every creator I know says. It’s an easy thing to “know” cognitively, and much harder to face down in experience.

I’ve said this to many other people who are interested in doing a podcast, but now I’m reminding myself: you can always change it later. Your show is your creation. And until you have a big audience anyway, it’s not like you are really risking anything. I have a friend who is worried about iterating on his show that he just started. It’s like, who cares?

I spent almost two years thinking about and toying with the idea of the podcast before I ever put it live. In retrospect, I wish I’d done what every advisor said, which is what I’m saying now; start, then learn.

Gratitude to Sahil and The Minimalist Entrepreneur community for making this so central to our conversations.

Which leads me to my second big lesson…

My partner in this conversation is Bo Burlingham. Bo is an editor-at-large of Inc. magazine and the author of five books which have profoundly impacted the trajectory of values-led, intentional business around the world.

Bo’s work has been such a big inspiration to me and foundational to a lot of my thinking over the years, so it was such a privilege to sit down with him. I don’t know of anyone that has explored more deeply, through real-world examples, what it means to build a meaningful business.

Bo has given name and voice to multiple movements that continue to shape the world of business, such as open book management, transparent start-ups, and the idea of small giants—companies that live from the truth that greatness and bigness have nothing to do with each other.

This is a fascinating conversation for anyone interested in exploring what it takes to create a business that is both personally and externally meaningful. We discuss questions such as what does it actually mean for a company to be great? What makes a company meaningful? What is the foundation of a values-driven approach to business? What are the roots of business success and service? And, what makes for the kind of business that makes everything it touches better for the contact?

I saved this conversation for episode 50, because it felt appropriate to celebrate that milestone by talking with one of the people whose work has most shaped the way I see the world of business and what’s possible with companies as a force for good progress in the world.

Please enjoy sitting down with the sage, Bo Burlingham.

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This episode flips the script and this time, Andrew is the guest! This is a crosspost of my interview on the “How I Give” podcast exploring entrepreneurship and philanthropy.

This was a fun and intimate interview about my own career journey, mental models, and worldview. It will help you get to know me much better, and what is behind this show.

As always, I love hearing what resonates and what doesn’t land with you. Please do send me feedback on Twitter at @askotzko.

Enjoy!

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This is a short, follow-up episode to ep42, which introduced a mental model for fulfilling work called ARM. That episode sparked several 1:1 follow up conversations with listeners, and I want to share a few lessons that have emerged since to add some nuance to the model:

1. engagement and performance are really about the work itself
2. making sense of passion vs purpose
3. how to think about internal vs external validation
4. how to think about toggling between internal and external explorations

As always, I love hearing what resonates and doesn’t land with you. Please do send me feedback on Twitter at @askotzko.

Enjoy!

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My partner in this conversation is Matt Kressy, the founding director of the MIT Integrated Design & Management (IDM) program. He’s an expert in innovation, leadership and product development. As an entrepreneur and founder of Designturn, he has designed, invented, engineered, and manufactured products for startups, Fortune 500 companies, and everything in between. And since 1999, he’s taught courses at MIT, Harvard, and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

Most recently, Matt is also on the founding team of New England Innovation Academy , the first middle and high school in the country that prepares students to shape the world through human-centered design.

This conversation was really heartfelt and I found it to be a beautiful exploration about art, design, and much of the inner drives that fuel our creative work. It’s a hard one to summarize, but it’s worth your time.

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Today, I am trying out a new kind of episode bringing you some big ideas. Even before I started doing the podcast, I read a lot and I still get asked about what books I recommend all the time. So I thought it could be fun to share the key ideas from books that have been very impactful to me. By me summarizing it, hopefully you will get a sense of some of the key ideas and know if the book is worth your time and energy to go deeper on.

There is no better place to start than with possibly my favorite leadership book of all time: “The Infinite Game,” by Simon Sinek.

Here’s the teaser: you probably aren’t playing the game you think you’re playing. Or at least not with the right mindset.

Enjoy, and let me know on Twitter what you think of this new episode format and what these ideas open up for you.

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This is an experiment inspired by my conversation with Pam Fox Rollin in episode #22, exploring the adaptation of “The Timeless Way of Building” to personal and creative leadership.

“The Timeless Way” is a classic book about the design of buildings and towns, which, to quote Pam, “asserts that places where you feel yourself come alive come about through a process in which the building or town grows organically out of the inner nature of the people in it… It’s a process which allows the life inside a person to flourish openly in freedom.”

I think that is such a beautiful idea. That inspires me to wonder, what if that was the impact on people that our teams, our companies, and our leaders had?

When Pam and I talked, she suggested this idea that I wanted to explore ever since, which is what brings us here today. She said it might be really interesting to swap out the word “building” for “leaders” or “teams,” that it could reveal something very interesting. I started with that, and then made other small substitutions and modifications to make the end result flow better. In this episode, I’ll share the first thing that came out of it.

This episode is 100% an experiment with a new format, where rather than an interview, I bring you a condensed idea. Let’s give it a try and see what we think. Let me know what you think on Twitter @askotzko or via email — what you like, what you don’t, etc. If we both enjoy it, I’ll play with more things in this direction.

This is obviously a derivative work, so credit for all original material goes to Christopher Alexander who wrote “The Timeless Way,” and a thank you to the writers collective Cincibility, which previously shared just the italicized parts of the book and saved me a bunch of typing.

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