Andrew Skotzko

Holly Hester-Reilly is the founder and CEO of H2R Product Science, where she combines more than a decade of experience in technology companies with years of experience in scientific research to bring her clients a rigorous, research driven approach to developing their growth strategy and coaching their product teams. 

In this conversation, Holly gives a masterclass addressing one of the biggest challenges we face: how to build a team and organization that is deeply connected to the people they seek to serve on an ongoing basis. In product management parlance, this is called continuous discovery or dual-track product discovery.

Even if you don’t work in a tech company or in product management, there is a lot of actionable and principled wisdom here that I believe is going to make an immediate and lasting impact on how you and your organization make the contribution you seek to make. 

Please enjoy!

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Sam Fankuchen is the Founder & CEO of Golden, a platform that makes it easy for anyone to volunteer and for organizers to manage their volunteers and staffing programs.

This episode was important to release now because of the amazing free tool Golden just launched, “Mutual Aid,” which helps anyone organizing responses to the COVID-19 pandemic so they don’t have to worry about the infrastructure and can focus on making a difference. 

Please enjoy!

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Derik Mills is the founder and CEO of Glo, a health and wellness company that challenges people to live a fulfilling life and live into their potential.

Glo exists to connect people through self-care so that, together, we can heal our planet. It’s a self-funded company whose online service empowers members around the world to experience world-class instruction in yoga, meditation, and philosophy and integrate self-care into their everyday lives from anywhere in the world.

Featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Goop, Oprah, and more, Glo has become a cultural phenomenon driven by Derik’s commitment to creating an environment that enables people to live into their potential and contribute to something larger than themselves.

One of the things that I most admire about Derik, and which I think really comes through in this episode, is his authenticity and vulnerability. He’s led the creation of a very successful company and is an example of how to transform one’s environment and company by transforming oneself. He’s doing it in a way that I find authentic, inspiring, and relatable — among many other things, we discuss how to be okay with things being a never-ending work in progress, and how to let go of shame, perfectionism, and engage well in the struggles of life and business.

We discuss many powerful experiences in Derik’s entrepreneurial journey, as well as the almost decade Derik spent traveling and experiencing the fullness of humanity around the world before getting into entrepreneurship.

I’m especially excited about this conversation, because Derik and Glo’s story are a real-world, ongoing case study of how to make real many of the essential concepts discussed on this show — entrepreneurship, a culture that is kind, candid, and creates high performance. This is a very raw, real story from the front lines of exploring what business is and can be, and I am honored to bring it to you.

Please enjoy this conversation with Derik Mills.

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The first thing you need to know about Muriel Clauson is that she’s SUPER passionate about people and sees her mission in life as unlocking human potential to help everyone live radically fulfilling lives.

Muriel is the founder of Anthill, researcher, speaker, and advisor to governments and companies globally on creating a better future of work. Her work has been featured in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Forbes. She speaks on the future of work globally with organizations including the World Bank, Singularity University, China’s SAI Task Force for Innovation, the Milken Institute, United States Embassies, the Young Presidents Organization, and many more. Muriel was named a 2017 “Game-Changer” by Women at the Frontier as an innovator in science and technology.

In this conversation, Muriel and I go deep on the future of work: identity, engagement, and being future-ready. We also discuss how to develop self-awareness and communicate your needs to coworkers, partners, and how to become future-ready. We even finish with a poetry reading which is surprisingly relevant to the topic at hand…

Please enjoy!

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Transcript

Transcripts may contain typos. With some episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Andrew 00:02:04 Thanks so much for taking the time to be here.

Muriel 00:02:07 Thank you for having me.

Andrew 00:02:13 You were just telling me about how you love to yell the bill. O’Reilly do it live. What exactly about that? What’s up with that.

Muriel 00:02:20 If anyone hasn’t seen it, you need to go on YouTube. So bill O’Reilly former news anchor at early career, there’s a great clip of him trying to film bumper recordings, and he becomes progressively more angry at the teleprompter and ends up just yelling. We’ll do it live very aggressively. Um, and that has become, anytime. Things are falling apart around our startup, that has become our joking thing that we shot. We’ll do it live. So, and Andrew and I just had to, we were just saying, we better just do it live.

Andrew 00:02:52 We would try to like come up with an interesting plan for the conversation

Muriel 00:02:56 We’re alive. My cofounder is, uh, he’s from South Korea. And he says that that is like the quintessential American clip for him. That bill O’Reilly shouting we’ll do a live. Yes. So I don’t know what that says about us.

Andrew 00:03:15 What about that? Like if you ask them, what about that is the, it makes it like quintessentially American for him.

Muriel 00:03:20 It’s the, it’s how he’s, you know, doing the surface acting, he goes back into character and then he’s like so angry again and just this emotion and big energy, I think that’s, I think that’s a stereotype we carry.

Andrew 00:03:32 Yeah. Yeah. Have you seen it, but this is really well it’s actually kind of related. Have you seen the, uh, the new documentary on Netflix called American factory?

Muriel 00:03:39 I haven’t, I need to see that I’m very bad at watching television.

Andrew 00:03:45 Same thing. I was just joking with me the other day. How, how, like media illiterate. I am, especially when it comes to TV and movies, I’m just always months behind it at, at, uh, at the best.

Muriel 00:03:55 Yeah. And it’s not, it’s not something I’m proud of. Even I it’s more that I just forget that that’s an option and I’m like, what should I do right now? And I, it never comes up in the list of things to do. I don’t know.

Andrew 00:04:06 You know what, that’s probably, I’m going to say writ large. That’s probably a good pattern in your life. Just having known you for several years now. I’m guessing that’s a good thing. And it’s probably one of the reasons you’re so engaged in prolific and all the things that you’re doing. But the reason I, the reason I was thinking about the American factory thing was it’s very relevant to the conversation we’re having today about the future of work, gets about a Chinese company buying and reopening it a, a big American factory and old GM plant in Ohio. And they talk a lot about the, uh, the cultural differences between, uh, for, for Chinese and American workers working together. And I was curious like, cause I know you’ve done some work in China. Um, what, like, what’s that been like, you know, as someone who pays very, very close attention to workplace cultures and people in the workplace, like what do you, what is stood out to you as you’ve explored that in both of those cultures?

Muriel 00:04:57 Yeah. I mean, I L I love cultural differences. I think he see them in many, many small ways. I think the thing I’m always struck by though, especially when I was doing some work in China is how similar people are. That’s always the thing I come away with. Uh, I think people think of China as this really, really different culture than the United States, but at the end of the day, you’re there everybody’s, you know, they get grumpy, they get hungry, they get happy, they laugh, they cry, you know, families are families, workplaces are workplaces. Um, the funny difference though, that stood out to me is how we write contracts. So in the United States, we basically, we hedge against negatives and we explicitly say what those negatives could be. That is not how you write a contract in China. You that’s like bad luck for the company. That’s a way to like, shoot yourself in the foot and you can’t have negatively worded things. So that was the biggest difference I saw. Um, and there’s other, there’s other funny stuff like that, but it’s only the little stuff like that. It’s never the big thing. It’s never the big human things.

Andrew 00:05:59 Yeah. That makes sense. Um, but wait, I’m really curious. So how do you write a contract in China

Muriel 00:06:04 With a lot of nuance? I’m glad I’m not a lawyer.

Andrew 00:06:08 I’m guessing that takes an entire team of lawyers from both cultures.

Muriel 00:06:11 It’s just a different, yeah. It’s a different way of even thinking about it, which is it’s fun. It’s fun to think about. Yeah, I don’t know, but yeah, we really hedge against negatives in our culture. It’s interesting. We’re very comfortable with that.

Andrew 00:06:24 The, um, the culture map by Aaron Meyer.

Muriel 00:06:27 I haven’t, should I read it?

Andrew 00:06:29 I think you’d be very interested in it for a lot of reasons, including the China thing we were just discussing, but also given that you’re, you have a lot of interest in workplace cultures and as well, spend a lot of time talking about like how you make, how you, how basically how people work together well and make that a great experience for everybody. But, uh, basically the reason I think you might be interested in that book is she, I think she’s a professor at, and I always say this wrong. Is it NCI and in Paris? Is that right? Oh yeah, sure. We’ll go with that. I always screw up how you say that, but it’s a very well known business school in France. And, um, she did this study and wrote a book about it, about how, um, different cultural factors, like the implicit things that are sort of below the surface affect working cross-culturally so things like, um, power, distance, um, how direct feedback is, um, high versus low context communication. So basically how implicit versus explicit are, you know, is the communication, um, do people directly, are they confrontational in an explicit way or an overt way, or is it, you know, avoiding, avoiding, or do people avoid confrontation? Like all sorts of things like that. And then she sort of maps it across cultures. And so when you’re working cross culturally, you can look at that and see where you’re going to have big differences in the way people approach a certain element of working together. And then you can hopefully get ahead of the problem.

Muriel 00:07:49 And I, yeah, I’m familiar with all of those ideas and I think they’re really true. I also think everything you just said is kind of tied to how we present, how we communicate our preferences of how we act. And that’s where I think the differences show up. I think latent traits that kind of unseen. I think humans are very similar across the board. And then it’s the thing that’s kind of hard to measure that kind of unseen, you know, things around personality. I’m a, we find that per the big five personality, there’s some fluctuation across cultures, but it’s, it’s pretty, I mean, there’s more variation within a culture than between cultures. Um, and yeah, I just think that, so that’s where I think humans are deeply similar and we have all these really cool nuances of how we present that. And so the main thing I try to get people to focus on is not like what’s different about cultures when you’re working together, but just having competence and really communicating your preferences and where you’re coming from and just like giving them the best opportunity to understand you.

Muriel 00:08:49 A lot of, a lot of communications cleared up when we do that, I’ve been thinking about communication a lot lately. We actually have a book we’re working on around it. Um, and that’s one of the ideas that’s really helped me. Um, I read a book a while ago by tech, not Han, I think he’s in your neck of the woods, right? And it’s Arctic communicating and he talks about how communicating, um, he comes from a Buddhist perspective and he talks about how, from his perspective, the role of communication is to reduce suffering. And we reduce suffering by giving someone a chance to be understood and by giving them a chance to understand us. And I thought that was such a good idea. And, and I think that’s the best tip to navigate cultural differences. Um, you know, I work super closely. I spend 80 hours a week with someone from a different culture and there’s so many times we could misunderstand each other, but we have this beautiful relationship because we, we lean into that and we give each other a chance to be understood and we give the other person every chance to understand that.

Andrew 00:09:45 I think it’s beautiful. Actually. I’d love to hear you talk a little bit more about how you do that because having been a founder myself, I know how intense it is. And, and the inter the, the founding team dynamics are, that’s a whole thing, right? Like they’re getting that right. And getting that to work well is challenging. And I mean, it’s like any relationship, it takes work and time and effort and energy and commitment and so on and so forth. But I’m really curious, like how, what have you found to be effective? Because in addition to all the normal stresses of doing a startup, the other, you also do have this cross cultural difference. Um, so I’m curious, like, are there any specific practices or ways that you, you make that work?

Muriel 00:10:21 Yeah, we have a few, um, one of our, we have a few kind of rules in general that we have with each other. So one, we adopted that idea of radical candor and blinking the off right now. But that was, yes. Thank you. I knew you would know you’re on, he, he is.

Andrew 00:10:34 It’s one of my favorite books. It’s on my book. I can see it right now across the room

Muriel 00:10:38 Idea. So we’re very, we’re, you know, we adopt that philosophy pretty universally. We also just give, I think we both take the responsibility to help the other person, the open-minded. So this is a principle I actually got from Ray Dalio principles. There we go. Um, I, I, you know, another great book. So there’s this idea of like, it’s important for us to be radically open-minded to be able to work with others effectively, all of that, but you also can communicate in a way that helps other people be open-minded with you. And we both have really worked on some of those things. So for example, um, like just, there’s just some body language things that can completely convey a different message to someone. And we’ve actually, we have permission even to check each other, if we’re ever in a tough conversation, someone’s allowed to even say like, Hey, can we like lean back on this one for a second?

Muriel 00:11:30 Or we’ll, we’re willing to let each other kind of cut the air with a knife when we need to. Um, that’s one big thing also though, we have set aside time that we’re actually just getting to know each other more as people, uh, it was so funny because I had no idea that he had been in the United States for a year of high school. I’ve known this guy for now six years. We’ve worked together so closely in our PhD, and then as cofounders and I had no idea, he’d spent a year of high school and it’s funny, you can think, you know everything about someone and you really haven’t gotten to know them fully. I mean, even people, our spouses for 40 years say this. So, um, so always giving each other room to still get to know each other. But then also we just have a rule of like, I trust you, you’ve proven your character to me. And so I’m going to adopt the most generous explanation with you always. And I’m going, if I’m ever giving you feedback, it’s because I’m on your team to help you do better. Um, but I’m also not gonna get hung up on every little thing. Cause I have the most generous assumptions behind everything that you do. And, and he’s earned that. And I think I’ve earned that too. And so we’re very fortunate in that regard.

Andrew 00:12:34 No, I, I, I love everything you just said. And one of the reasons I’m, so I’m leaning into this so much is you’re actually doing what so many people talk about doing, and that’s why I’m like, Oh, wow, I want to hear about how you are actually doing this. So I would actually dig it a little bit more. I think it’s interesting because this is honestly, these topics have come up throughout this podcast and these are recurring themes. And so I want to, you know, here’s a new opportunity for, for myself and for the listener to learn from someone doing it. Uh, so I want to see that opportunity. So, um, I’m really curious. How did you, I think where a lot of the stuff seems like it falls down and I’m curious if you agree with this and please disagree. If you don’t is setting it up, like creating the agreements, creating the structure so that you can actually have this dynamic seems where a lot of people fall down. Like once you’re up and going, like, you know how to do this now you’ve got a rhythm together. That’s wonderful. But how did you get that?

Muriel 00:13:26 Oh yeah. No. The biggest problem people make in every relationship is we wait until we have problems to try to do the right things. And it’s so funny when we first just, we lean back and rely on magic and then suddenly we go, Oh, this isn’t working now, I’m going to try all these best practices when we’re already deepened a problem. And that that’s just, you can get out of that, but that’s just so much more challenging. So we are explicit and proactive with everything. Um, we make

Andrew 00:13:54 Have a, you had a conversation even before you were right when you were starting, what was that conversation?

Muriel 00:14:00 So we for, we just sat, we’ve talked about what was important to both of us. We talked, we even made room for both, both people to share, like, what are your concerns about working with me? Where are the areas you could see this going wrong? I’m like, what are you excited about working together? Um, but both, I think it just required both of us, first of all, to check our egos at the door and be like, the goal is that we both have this great relationship and we build an incredible company together. So how do we get there? But yeah, we had really tough conversations. Um, also I try to really manage expectations around the things that I know are weaknesses. For me, a young Jane are both the kind of people we’re always trying to grow and learn, but we’re also who we are.

Muriel 00:14:39 And so I’m just explicit with managing those expectations. And that was a big thing to kind of being like, here’s where I’m probably going to be a little hard to work with sometimes. Um, and you’re, and I’m giving you to check me on those things, but I also need you to know that’s going to be something that’s maybe there. Um, I, for me, I have actually, there’s just a difference with how my brain works, that I’ve had my whole life, um, where I get hyperfocused on things. So I actually worked with someone when I was a kid to learn to not do it too much, but I will get hyper-focused and I’m not always the most fun person to collaborate with when I’m in hyper-focus, it’s a great skill and I’m trying to get a lot of stuff done, but it’s not great always for a teammate.

Muriel 00:15:20 So I’m just very clear with him on that. I own that, that doesn’t make me a horrible person to work with. That’s just a reality. And I think it makes me a great person to work with if I can own that and like give someone permission to work with that effectively. Um, yeah. And everybody has their thing. So I think, and that’s something that will come up in any conversation you have with me on the future of work too. I think we are in the dark ages of knowing ourselves and having self awareness. I think it’s such a luxury that only few people get to have real self insight. Um, and I hope that we start to give that to more people. Um, I see even things like cognitive behavioral therapy apps that are purely just therapy, focus, network focus. I consider those future work products because I think one of the biggest challenges in our workplace is just people not knowing how to be good to each other, um, while working towards a goal. And so that’s, uh, that’s just, it’s so important in the future, right. But I’m getting ahead of myself with that, but, um,

Andrew 00:16:20 I love it. It’s actually a good transition point. And I want to use that actually we’ll, we’ll start to switch gears and dive into the future of work here, but, um, you brought up something that I think is, I agree with you is extremely important, which is the idea of self awareness, right? And, and what a gift it is to have the opportunity to really like w w one of my foundational beliefs or, um, my, one of my thesis, my thesis behind a lot of this is that, um, what work is for is that work is a place. We go, it’s a platform to develop and express who we are in service of something greater than ourselves. And part of that is knowing and learning who we are. And then, you know, from that truth going and building things that are useful to not only ourselves, but others in the world.

Andrew 00:16:58 And so the self awareness piece is foundational to it. And so one of the things that’s always, I mean, you and I have been friends for like four years now. And one of the things that I can think back to when we first met, even then that stuff that’s so stood out to me about you was your level of self awareness. Like you have an extraordinary degree of self awareness. Um, and I’m really curious, like, I mean, I remember when I was doing some research, getting ready for this conversation. I think, I remember once you told me we were, we were, uh, I think we were going for a walk in Venice by the beach. And, uh, you told me we were having this really deep conversation and you, you told me something that I never forgot, which is that your mission in life was to help, uh, basically to help people unlock potential and help people lead radically fulfilling lives. And you have a level of clarity, uh, about that, that I am. So I admire it tremendously and I love it. And what, I didn’t know that came up in my research. Was it, you, I think wrote that down when you were 12.

Muriel 00:17:54 Yes, I, yeah. And so it’s not necessarily how I would word it today. I just decided to be loyal to that part of myself and stick with it. Um, but yeah, I, from a very young age, um, I had parents who were very intentional at having us think about our purpose and what we really wanted to do with our lives and who we are. Um, and I had the kind of parents, even that, um, they let us make our own choices to the extent that I made some probably pretty bad choices, high school from just like a maturity perspective of about major life decisions. Um, and, but they let me make those choices. And so I think I had such a extreme level of forming that early on that it was always important to me and it felt so incredible to me every time I got to learn something, um, that helped me understand myself better from a strengths perspective, from a weaknesses perspective or from what I care about.

Muriel 00:18:50 And that I just, I saw a lot of people around me, um, who didn’t see this big vision for their lives. And it seemed like it was because they just didn’t have, I don’t know if it’s that they didn’t have role models around them or that they just didn’t see how they could fit into a bigger picture. Um, there’s an organization that, um, here in Chicago where I’m, where I’m based now, um, that basically just takes people out of what we refer to here as the South side. That’s where there’s a lot of crime here in Chicago and they just basically bring these kids downtown just to see what it’s like to see people going to work and everything. And even that experience can so radically shift something for these kids. And, and I just thought like, what if we just could see a vision of what our lives could be like, what if just more people just could see themselves doing something? What if they could see themselves being happy? What if they could see themselves being kind. Um, and I just think that we lack that vision in small and large ways. Um, and so that was always really important to me. And I’m so grateful that I, I was raised with, um, those ideas. I consider that a huge privilege and I don’t think it’s the only way to be, but it’s something I thought that a lot of people could benefit from. Um, and so what I wanted to work on,

Andrew 00:20:05 I love it. How did you, how did, what was it like because you reached a level of clarity at 12 that many people far later in their lives are still trying to get to, how did you do that

Muriel 00:20:17 On, I was a weird kid. I mean, I, so I was at a hospital and, uh, someone came, escaped from a TB ward who was having some mental health challenges. And I got infected with tuberculosis, um, at nine. So I had a very different year at kind of a, a pretty formative age and I, and I’m fine. I was, you know, awesome medical system worked great for me. Um, at that time I was able to get great treatment, which I feel very fortunate cause people do die from that disease around the world still. Um, but yeah, I, after that, I think I just had a different mentality. I didn’t really care about fitting in as much. And I just, Kate became kind of a weird kid. It never wore off. I’m still a really weird kid.

Andrew 00:21:08 You are. And I’m a huge fan of that.

Muriel 00:21:09 Yeah. Yeah. But I think those things that those things can, anything that gets you out of your, and that’s the same idea. I was just talking about anything that kind of breaks, whatever cycle you’re in. Cause I think I, I cared a lot about, um, like soccer and glitter and um, you know, dolphins and, you know, the usual stuff and all those things are great, but I, you know, I cared about like things you’d find in coloring books. And then suddenly I found myself like thinking about things a little differently and I think it’s just cause I was forced out of the fun routine I was in before it was a good routine. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I was forced out of that routine.

Andrew 00:21:45 We’ve hinted about one of the main topics we’re going to cover here, which is the future of work. So for someone who’s not familiar with that term, how would you explain that in layman’s terms, Muriel, what is the future of work and why should someone listen to this care?

Muriel 00:21:57 So I, I like to section it off into a few different things because I think that’s part of why it’s hard to define because work is such a big word. So I think there’s a future of the workforce, which is, I think what people were initially focused on that is like, how is labor actually changing over time? What supply and demand around labor is what’s that picture going to look like? Um, what kind of job opportunities are going to exist? How do we mitigate risks around that? I think that’s where the future of work conversation started. So I think that’s still where a lot of people’s minds go, but that’s future the workforce to me. Um, I think there’s this new kind of branch, which is the future of kind of the experience of working. Uh, so that could be anything from like how do we help people, uh, work together more effectively, that can be anything around just how do we make work more positive thing in people’s lives, just inherently like the act of doing it.

Muriel 00:22:50 Um, that can also be how do we get people working on things that are meaningful for what our world needs. Um, and then I also think there’s this whole other camp that I’m more and more interested in all the time with, which is just like, it’s kinda just a feature of human, like the human experience and like are, how do we make this as rich as possible for people? And we can align that with ROI. I mean, my company, we, we are doing something that I believe is really, really important for the human experience, but it’s still is actually meeting a business need in society. So it’s a sustainable thing that we can do. Um, so it’s not like it has to be just a fluffy thing, but I think there’s this new piece of the future of work where we’ve, there’s some exciting stuff happening around, um, like how do we actually make that human experience richer for more people? How do we give people access to dignity and meaning in their lives?

Andrew 00:23:42 So we’ve got the future of the workforce, the future of the work experience, and then even more broadly the future of the human experience.

Muriel 00:23:48 That’s the, those are the buckets I like to think in. What does it all mean? What’s my definition. You want a unifying definition? If you got one, go for it. I don’t know if I do. I’ll try. I’ll always try. I mean, just, I think when I say future work, I mean, like what’s the vision of, of the human experience we want to create around something that’s really integral to our lives work. I’m not a definition person, you know, that that’s true. I do know I’d rather swim around in an abstract sea of ideas. Let’s do that.

Andrew 00:24:23 And we’ll just, wait, wait a minute. These ideas. Yeah. It goes back to that core idea of, you know, the, the twin pillars of a meaningful life are meaningful work and meaningful relationships. Um, and you know, it’s like, this is a huge, huge part of our lives. What are some of the misconceptions that people have about this idea? Cause there’s so many articles and videos and people in the news and whatever about, you know, the future of work and robots are gonna take our jobs and et cetera, et cetera. And I know you have seen all of that. So what are, what are those big misconceptions and, uh, how, how would you suggest that someone think about that instead?

Muriel 00:24:58 Yeah, I think some of the misconceptions are around just where technology is today for one. Um, I think, I think there’s been a very sensationalized narrative talking about a lot of technologies and I think it’s left people in the dark. Um, what vena eminence, you, who you should absolutely have on this podcast and anyone who’s hearing those listen to that episode. Cause she’s awesome. Um, she, she left Nina eminence. So she’s been, she’s been in CTO roles at a lot of large tech companies. She left, um, HP recently to start an organization called humans for AI. So I get to be on the board there, which is a wonderful experience. It’s such a cool organization. Um, but her focus is how do we create a common language around these technologies so that people can actually jump in. And she’s very focused on diversity inclusion because she says that the outsized impact that all of this kind of, especially AI can have in society and how we make decisions in micro and macro ways, um, that can’t be informed by just one type of person because the data that we’re using and the bias there and how we structure that data and how we apply, then our tool to problems.

Muriel 00:26:14 There’s so much opportunity for bias at each of those points that it is so critical that we bring more people to the table. So she doesn’t want everyone to become a programmer necessarily, but she’s really focused on how do we get domain experts or people from all walks of life speaking, a common language, so they can be a part of developing a tools of the future. And I love that idea, um, because I really think that it’s often, I think it’s very easy to be like, Oh, this is an important skill. Let’s have everybody learn this skill. Let’s all become a programmer. That’s the future. And we forget that there’s actually room for lots of different types of people at the table and things are richer when we bring a lot of perspectives, it’s just figuring out a way to bring those perspectives together. So I love any kind of common language approach you’re on tech, any organization doing that, please reach out to me.

Muriel 00:27:02 I would love to pair it, what you’re doing, because I think it’s really important. That’s one piece, another misconception kind of related is this idea that there are like certain skills that people need to learn and that we can just like re skill people with like shoving those skills down their throat. Um, I think just the whole upskilling thing. So there’s a version of upscaling and rescaling. I agree with. So I’ll tell you what I don’t agree with. So actually I’ll give you an example of part of what I think could be better just in how we do this in society generally, and then I’ll go to the details. So if you think of, if you think about old, um, I love to read about like coupla con and all the old Mongol, hordes and old military strategy and stuff. That’s all really fascinating. I don’t know, can’t confirm or deny.

Muriel 00:27:51 Um, so, so back in that context, there was this idea that we look at kind of the power, the human power we have in a, in a civilization, and then we’d form a strategy around it with our military, right. Um, now we have corporations that say, okay, here’s our strategy. Here’s what we’re trying to achieve. We’re going to plug people in to be that kind of human power behind it. And I think there’s, you know, there’s pros and cons with both, but I think that is one big flaw in how we’re thinking about the future work. Cause I think we’re still thinking like, okay, here’s what an organization is trying to accomplish, shove people into where there’s going to be a spot for humans. And I think as long as we’re thinking about like, okay, here’s what a job will exist in the future. Let’s shove people into that.

Muriel 00:28:37 I think we’re missing out on a lot of potential. I think we’re limiting solutions that we can see. Uh, I’m much more excited by the idea of actually understanding people better, actually understanding competencies, capabilities, knowledge, skills, abilities, other characteristics that they bring to the table. And then coming up with the constellation of ways we can apply that. I think then we’re going to come up with a lot more solutions. So just that whole mentality of how we’re thinking about like, Oh, let’s figure out the top five skills you need for the future. And then go shove a training down everyone’s throat around that. I just think that’s the, that’s just not the way we’re going to make leaps forward as a society. Um, I think we make leaps forward when we have something that is greater than the sum of its parts. So that’s a big shift that is important to me.

Muriel 00:29:27 Another one though, is that, um, the misconception I think is that people are only caring about economics. Um, I think UBI is part of the solution. At some point, I think there will be a stage that something like that will become something like that, I think will be some level of that will be a part of society at some point. I don’t think that if all, if, if let’s say we live in a world where jobs go away, I don’t think that would solve all of our problems. I think there are absolutely things that work serves in our lives outside of just making money. And so I’m very, I hope that more people are focusing on not just a job for money, but actually like the human experience and some of the identity that goes along with that. Um, I worked with a lot of like truck drivers and the research I’ve done over the past several years.

Muriel 00:30:21 Um, and it’s not that they’re in, they’re scared of losing just the economic piece, which that is scary. There’s a lot of truck drivers that have taken very large loans out to drive their trucks and whatever. Um, and so that’s a, that’s a real threat, but there’s also this, you know, my dad was a truck driver. I love being a truck driver. It’s a big part of my identity, it’s who I am. And so I think just assuming that we can be like, well, here’s a higher paying job for you. We gave you the skills for it. Be happy. I think that’s the wrong mentality too. I think we have to get a lot more creative with how we’re helping people see how their identity fits into the future. And that’s why people are, if you see any kind of insecurity research, which I’ve done a lot of focus on job insecurity, it’s always that we just don’t see how our identity fits into the future picture.

Muriel 00:31:10 That’s what makes us insecure in relationships. That’s what makes us, so let’s say that, let’s say that I, um, am at a company and my specialty is that I would come up with these great reports. And that was kind of what I was known for. I would come up with these reports that everyone would read, give like a really holistic idea. Let’s say they just, they just promoted this hot shot manager guy. And he he’s like, well, we’ve gotta be agile and fast. We’re not going to do reports anymore. That’s going to make me feel insecure in my job because that was my thing. That was my identity here. And now I’m not seeing how that fits in the future, if that’s a simple example, but then we see that on a huge, and we see that all the time in workplaces, that’s a huge problem. And that’s when we actually see people starting to disengage, which I think we miss them. I think we missed the Mark on engagement because we forget how much engagement is just people seeing a future somewhere that they can identify with. Um, and that’s a whole broader discussion, but I’m really, I hope we get to have

Andrew 00:32:05 Fascinating. Yeah, that’s a fascinating, tell me more about that because that’s a fascinating definition of engagement that I’ve never heard before.

Muriel 00:32:10 Well, it’s not so much my definition it’s that I’m not so interested in measuring attitudes around engagement. If we’re not also focused on how do we drive more engagement? I think there are several pieces to driving engagement, but the one most overlooked that I think we can actually make a material difference around. And this is really what my company focuses on is how do we help people see on a, from a personal identity level, how they fit into the future at their job, um, or at their company or in the world or whatever.

Muriel 00:32:40 Um, because at the end of the day, even if your coworkers are friendly to you, even if you have a nice boss, even if you have ping pong tables in the break room and really, really good granola, when you roll it in the morning, that’s freely available. Like you are not going to be engaged in your job. If you don’t personally see how, what I offer my identity, I actually see that fitting into the future of where this is going. I actually can see a path forward for myself. You’re just not,

Andrew 00:33:08 Is there another way of saying that, that you need to be able to see the way that you contribute to this thing you need?

Muriel 00:33:13 Yeah. And humans really care about contributing actually. Um, you know, we’re, we’re all, we’re all a little lazy too. We all have our, you know, our rough edges, but at the end of the day, something very consistent about human behavior is that we are a scientific word. People use this H antic, but we have this like contributing that to us. Um, we, we need to enact some change in our environment. That’s actually a very core kind of need and there’s different ways to do that. And there’s really destructive ways to do that. And there’s really healthy ways to do that. But that is something that we see is pretty universal, even in people who would maybe, um, encapsulate is more passive on a spectrum of passive, to assertive IX. Still we see that people have that need to kind of enact something on their environment via part of something.

Muriel 00:34:01 They leave a Mark that’s, that’s a big need. And so if you are a totally replaceable interchangeables, I mean, have you ever been engaged in a relationship or job where you felt like a completely interchangeable piece that they could just immediately replace and you would have no value and not even be remembered crap? Yeah. It’s a crap feeling. You’re not going to be engaged on job. I don’t care how good the free granola is. So that’s where I think the whole engagement hold the whole arena around engagement has really missed it is that we’re focusing on some of the kind of symptoms of like, or some of the kind of icing on the cake, but we haven’t actually thought about how do we drive the core of what makes someone engaged. Um, and the cool, the really cool news. And this is what we stumble young, Jay and I stumbled upon and then got so excited to work on is that there’s a very effective way of actually driving this that also helps people learn and grow along the way. And that is like, what is driving the engagement and you’re getting your people to grow. So we’re like, and that’s where building, I mean, that’s where we’re.

Andrew 00:35:09 Okay. Tell me about that mural. What does that yeah,

Muriel 00:35:11 That’s where we can’t so well, so I, in the past, I was a part of, um, there’s kind of this trend for a little while that I was lucky enough to catch the wave of when I was in my early twenties, where executives were hiring, um, early 20 somethings to be their executive coaches, which it was a funny concept, but I think the idea was kind of, well, we’re not needing someone, who’s a business expert. We want someone who just thinks differently and can probe with the right questions, us to learn about ourselves.

Muriel 00:35:38 And that’s why that actually it was largely effective. Um, because executive coaching is mostly just a self awareness exercise. You’re really just so typically using actual assessments or some kind of psychometric tests, something like that. Um, you are figuring out kind of a snapshot of where this person is maybe a more holistic picture of who they are in a static way as well. And then tying kind of some changes that would be good to organizational strategy. And you’re just really then just reminding them over time to focus on the right things. That’s really executive coaching in a nutshell. Um, and so we were looking at that process and we realized that that’s actually, when you take that same approach and you apply it to someone at any level an organization, that’s actually an incredible way to make them feel engaged. You help them understand their identity, how that identity ties to the organization and you’re guiding them along their pathway to get where they’re going.

Muriel 00:36:35 And so we were like, okay, so you can’t afford to have an executive coach for every single person and organization. How do we make that possible? And that’s what we worked on throughout our PhD. Um, we were always throwing around ideas of how could we actually scale that. Um, and we figured out how to do it. It’s not going to be the same as working with a person, but, uh, we basically took, uh, so many more than you want to know, psychometric tests that measure anything from personality to mindset, to technical skills, to leadership capabilities. Uh, we put them into this model where we looking at all the linkages between those expected relationships, with tons of historical data, we’re able to create this kind of machine learning model, where we can get just a few insights about someone and already have a pretty holistic idea of where they might land on a lot of these things. Uh, we, then we trigger them with, uh, insight, which we’re calling a nudge. That’s the vernacular that society has adopted for that. And then we just do that over time. So we basically figured out a way just to scale what we did as executive coaches with the technology.

Andrew 00:37:41 Okay. So let me, let me just make sure I’m understanding not only for, for myself first and foremost, but also for the listener. So when you look at your experience in executive coaching and that field or set of practices, essentially what I think you’re saying is that you’re working with someone who is under working to understand you and who you, not only who you are, but who you can become and how that fits into the future that you want to create, whether it’s at this organization or in your life or both, and then sort of over time, it’s sort of like, it’s almost like they, they’re creating a mirror and they’re holding that mirror up to you. So you can see more clearly who you are, how you’re acting in this moment relative to who you are and who you want to become. And then you can course correct. And, and over time continue to live into that future. You’re trying to create, is that the core of it?

Muriel 00:38:27 Yeah, that’s the core of this. So I mean, our customers work with us because they are trying to drive engagement, typically focused on reducing turnover and they have

Muriel 00:38:36 Serious rescaling needs. So they want there, they have things, the competencies that there are, people do not have that they need them to have. Um, and so beautifully, those two things work really well together in this model. And they work really well if you did traditional executive coaching, but we figured out how to,

Andrew 00:38:52 Yeah, those two things being which

Muriel 00:38:54 Engagement, but also helping people learn the skills and competencies they need to overtime because training one-off trainings are great for motivation. They’re not great for actually sustaining behavioral change. So, so basically it’s, it’s a very simple tool in the end. So somebody who is an employee at one of the companies we work with, they, they have an app they interact with what looks like a chat bot. It’s not a true chat bot, but it feels like you’re having a quick conversation. You’re just answering three quick questions though. This is like a 32nd session. And then you get your behavioral change nudge of the day. You can also see your full reports about, uh, across all of these different things we’re measuring, um, for you. Uh, one thing that we ethically really, really cared about with our company is that people, insights means the people actually get those insights about themselves.

Muriel 00:39:41 Not just that the company gets people insights. Um, so people get all the insights on themselves, which we think is a missed opportunity in other platforms, because that’s actually a great way to drive behavioral changes. Someone’s seeing themselves more clearly. Um, and then the company’s actually able to kind of manage the rescaling program through this systems. They’re able to input content that they need people to be learning. They’re able to actually see where skills gaps are in the organization across heat maps. Um, so it’s, it’s pretty robust on what, not on the customer side, but on the, on the user side, it’s very simple. And it’s based on simple executive coaching. You learn a little bit about yourself through a nudge. It’s a reminder. And then you do that over time and you’re shaping your behavior.

Andrew 00:40:22 So just to clarify one term or two terms, you use the terms re-skilling and up-skilling yeah. Are they the same or what, what is the difference?

Muriel 00:40:30 So technically rescaling would be like, we need you to have a different skill set. We’re going to train you to have a different skillset. Upskilling is like, we need you to have more advanced skills in an arena where you’re already working. Um, they are used

Andrew 00:40:46 About whether you have an existing competency or not. And if you, if you’re ever to further developing an existing competency, that’s upscaling. And if it’s like, you just need a whole new one.

Muriel 00:40:55 Yeah. Except for now those, and that’s how those words started when you, when we were, everyone was first doing research in the space. That’s how it was that distinction was made now. No one makes the distinction and people just throw both words around and it pretty much just means we want you to learn new things. Yeah. Gotcha. And I’m not a huge fan of either of those words. I think you should have a podcast contest of who can come up with the best word. That’s not reskilling or upskilling for this, for what’s happening. Yeah. That’s, that’s that one, that one would be good. I think learning though, then people feel like, um, it gets conflated with other things, but you’re probably right. We should probably just call it learning.

Andrew 00:41:30 I want to just try to understand a little bit more about how it works. So someone at one of these companies comes in, they, they, they open their app, they do some sort of onboarding process of whatever length. And so that is helping you to, you sort of have cooked up or cooked, cooked together a bunch of these psychometric assessments. And then from that, you’re sort of building, um, I think we talked about this at dinner that one time about like you’re building a, uh, basically a graph of their skills, their strengths relative to what the organization, I think you’re, I think it’s like you take, you take a test and you’re building a skills graph of what they’ve got relative to what the organization thinks it needs and the future competencies for the kind of the path they’re on in the organization. And then your presumably you are using strong, the strongest signals in the data. You’ve got to infer the other things they need

Muriel 00:42:22 That that is almost spot on. Yeah. So definitely the last part. So we basically take signal the database. So first let me just back up. So psychometric tests all have a structure behind them, kind of an architecture where normally we have like a trait we’re predicting and then we have kind of facets of that trait. So let’s say we’re interested in your personality. Then we maybe would have the big five. So like openness would be one of the facets. Then there’s some facts,

Andrew 00:42:50 A psychometric test for someone who doesn’t know that term is what

Muriel 00:42:53 It’s a test to measure something unseen, something latent about a person. So that could be any personality tests, any IQ tests, any kind of general mental ability test, any spatial reasoning test, any leadership competency test, any three 60 you’ve ever done, those would all be psychometric tests. Um, and I’ve, and I said way too much time with Tega metric tests over the years. So sorry for not clarifying that. Um, so, so let’s say we’re trying to predict personality. That would be our trait we’re interested in. Um, and then, or yeah, and then the, the second tier we’d look at maybe openness is one of the facets. If we’re doing big five personality, five factor model, which is kind of the one that everyone knows, um, within openness. So there’s other sub facets, which would be things like how intellectual you are or how, uh, how fantasy oriented you are, things like that. So anyway, there’s that architecture, there’s that tiered architecture behind every test. So basically what we did is we took a lot of historical data across, um, over like 52 psychometric tests in our initial catalog. And we basically measured all of the relationships across all of these data points and this historical data. And we’re able to create this, this model, um, which has all of those tests that architecture linked together using network analytic data modeling. So we have basically this massive constellation of what you could be across all of this catalog. Uh, so then when

Andrew 00:44:21 Like a meta assessment where any entry point, you can almost predict where they would, how they would read out on a different assessment. And so now if I took like the strengths finder, you could like, sorry, I’m just gonna make sure I really make this concrete though. If I, for example, if what I just said is true, it’d be like, uh, I take the big five assessment, right? And so you, you can see, I have a certain score on openness and a variant of, sorry, in your word, a facet of openness, like intellectual openness, which I’m definitely high on. Um, and then given your, your sort of underlying network of, of these across all these assessments, you could then I assume predict how I would score on a different assessment and sort of integrate all these things together into one holistic nudge system.

Muriel 00:45:03 Yeah. So, and that’s, and that’s really the value of what we offer. So somebody doesn’t have to sit down and take an hour long test to learn about one of these things. Instead, every time we’re learning about you, every time you interact with our tool, we sharpen what we know, but it only takes three data points for us to give you a behavioral change nudge. And our, and it’s a learning tool over time. It’s, we’re learning more about you. Um, you’re learning more from this tool. It, it sharpens and it gets better, but we’re right away getting just help develop people. So this has been really useful and we’ve tested this with like medical groups where doctors don’t, they don’t take time to go do leadership development trainings, for example, but that’s something that’s become really important in that industry. Um, and so this is perfect.

Muriel 00:45:47 It’s literally a two minute segment where you’re very quickly giving a little bit of insight about yourself and then you’re getting your nudge. Um, and that nudge is always triggered by what we see as the most important thing for you to focus on. Sometimes that’s going to be weighted by an organizational objective. Some of our customers choose to go that way. Others choose to let it be free form and focus just on the most important competencies. Cause we’ve actually rank ordered what is important from a future perspective in terms of general competencies someone could have. Um, so it’s, it’s a fun tool. It’s very simple though, in what it feels like, but there’s a lot going on behind the scenes with the data.

Andrew 00:46:23 I’m imagining some of the brainstorming sessions you and Kaban have had about this because I can see the overlaps right here.

Muriel 00:46:29 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We both, yeah. We were definitely raised by the same parents. So you can tell. Yeah. So my brother for anyone listening, my brother is also a founder of a company. It’s an anonymous opinion platform called true public. They collect more insights on gen Z than any company in the world. Right now they do some really interesting stuff, but they basically made a responding to, I guess, what are kind of polls like entertaining by sharing insights back with people. So check it out. There’s my plug for my brother.

Andrew 00:46:59 Yeah, there you go. It is, it is a fun app. I had a really fun jam crush about it like a year ago. Um, I should actually get him on the show now that I think of it.

Muriel 00:47:08 What’s fun. You can’t have that much fun.

Andrew 00:47:11 Uh, I think I can. I think in fact, I think I should. So I have two questions about what you just said, and this is sort of, we’re diving into the, a little bit of how the sausage is made here and the product side of this I’m imagining, and you sort of answered it, but I want to just clarify. So if I’m someone taking your assessment, right. And so basically I’m, I’m, I’m trusting your assessment that it’s going to guide me in a good direction for my future, for the future. I want to have, um, the question I would have is how was I like you to just expand on this? How is th how are these recommendations being made? What is the North star you are guiding me towards? How do I know it’s a North star I’m going to be happy about?

Muriel 00:47:48 Yeah. So we’re using established measures in our catalog, at least for the first 52, um, components, which would last you like over a year if user ship, if you just went through our standard, our standard plan, um, there’s a lot that we can tinker and change within that. And there’s a lot that accompany could also insert into our catalog that our system can hold and take you through. Um, so either what you’re being brought through is kind of what we’ve identified are these are, these are well established models that are tied to important outcomes that are good for people. These are things that are helpful to know or they’re, or they’re something where there’s no necessarily right or wrong answer. We’re balancing, which is a big part of what we do with executive coaching. So that it’s this kind of a model we’ve replicated. The other side though, is anything that your organization inputs, we know that for you to be successful in that organization, this is helping you get there.

Muriel 00:48:41 But within the context of who you are, that’s something that’s important to us is that there’s not one version of leadership, but we’re going to figure out like what’s the pieces kind of really important your organizational contexts that you do need to, to get ahead, which people care about that Pratt from a practical perspective, it becomes a lot more organizational driven when we get into the technical skill component that comes in. We always start though first with mindset second, with some core personality, um, because that also helps us. We actually change how we even net your behavior based upon what we learn about your personality. Cause we know how to reach different personalities better. So it’s very personalized if we do some light customization for organizations, um, but at the, at the, at the bare bones level, like why should you trust that it’s getting you in a good direction is because it’s, it’s based upon years and years of historical data of what did we learn about executives with that we’re trying to accomplish something and how did we get them to a better place? Um, nothing is going to make you be like a worst person in terms of character. It’s all things that increase like how you are treating people. Well, um, like prioritizing effectively, uh, making prudent decisions, thinking critically, um, you know, understanding how to get buy in from other people. Anytime we’re talking on the soft skill side, it’s something like that. Some of those universal things that are effective.

Andrew 00:50:00 Yeah. Cause I’ve heard you say elsewhere that I think you said soft skills are the power skills of the future. And it seems, it seems like that’s a lot of where the nontechnical side of this is pointed is that are the, the, the, those power skills is very human skills that are, um, they can be developed and they are critical to the future of work is what I think you should.

Muriel 00:50:20 Oh yeah. And actually I would even feel comfortable with this product, not having any technical skills included. I would still say that is a great rescaling tool because I’m not convinced there is some set skill set that people need at all. I have not seen any research that convinces me of that. What I think people need is to be very self aware, very adaptive and very like able to learn and the way that is going to be most effective and, and proactive for them. Um, I think they need those power skills, so soft skills, so that they’re ready for anything. So I’m more interested in how do we get an entire cohort in a company future ready, then I’m interested in teaching people how to public speak or how to program.

Andrew 00:51:06 Yeah, it sounds like what you’re really like translating into some of the language I use on this show. It sounds like you’re really much more interested in the foundational meta skills that will enable someone to be anti-fragile to any future that comes their way as opposed to being future resilient with a specific skill like programming.

Muriel 00:51:23 Yeah. A hundred percent. Yes. You said that perfectly we’re we will have you do all of our marketing from Noah. Okay, cool.

Andrew 00:51:33 My gift to you. Thank you.

Muriel 00:51:34 Awesome. Yeah.

Andrew 00:51:36 Is there, is there a difference between, so, um, there’s a term that, uh, I I’m glad exists now, uh, that has come into usage in the last few years called, uh, antifragile or antifragility is there, but I’ve also seen the term thrown around a lot in this conversation when I’m, you know, reading articles or on the news or whatever of, you know, sort of like quote, fear being future resilient. Do you think of those as different things or w what is, what, how do you think of this?

Muriel 00:52:02 I’ve used both for years. So when I first started working in the future of work and what in 2013, um, I would always say future proof. And then I say, Oh, don’t say future proof, because that doesn’t make any sense. Um, and then I switched to this idea of future resilience, like, Oh yeah. I’m like steely and ready for anything, but then it was actually one of my PhD advisors at the time. Uh, he’s an awesome, awesome thinker on this topic. He’s, he’s, uh, teaches, uh, out of, uh, goes at, as business school at Emory university in Atlanta. Um, does really interesting research now, by the way, with, um, machine learning tools and hospital settings and everything, he, you should have him on the show. He’s great. Um, we’ll get all these people in the room, get everybody on the show. We can have a big deal.

Muriel 00:52:46 All the people I love on the show. Um, so what he said though, is he’s like, why would you he’s like resilient. He’s like, that’s like the digging your heels and like, let the wind blow against you, but you’re not going to fall. And he’s like, is that really the best we can do any challenged me to think different differently than that. And so since then, I’ve really embraced this idea of future ready, mostly because I just don’t like the word anti thrown into something. I it’s just not positive enough for me. I like a positive spin on everything. Um, so I, I love the idea of future ready is, and it’s not, that doesn’t mean you’re perfect. That doesn’t mean you have all the skillsets, but you have this readiness to you, um, that you can take on what life throws at you and I, yes, I like that a lot better than resilience, but it’s, I think all of this comes down to like, what is, what are, how are we defining these things? I think how some people define resilience fits that. But that’s the, that’s the idea. I like to kind of picture that person. Who’s just almost like, okay, pass me the ball. I’m gonna,

Andrew 00:53:45 Yeah. They’re just like nibble on there. Ready for whatever. Yeah. Put me in coach. I’m ready. I love that idea of like the way it was explained to me, at least the way I have it framed in my head is, is the idea of resiliency versus antifragility and FairPoint about, you know, the idea of antifragile being, maybe we need a better term for that. But, um, the, the way it was explained to me was that anything that is resilient is still defined by its breaking point. So it can be really, really strong, but it still is, has this breaking point where, you know, you know, there is a point beyond which you push it, that it snaps a, whereas something that is antifragile is actually aided by that, which pushes it. Right. So it’s like, um, you know, it gets stronger, the more it’s attacked, so to speak. Right. And so, and that is while that’s a bit of a negative metaphor, it is a powerful idea. If you can be, if you could exist in a state of readiness like that, which I think a lot of it comes back to mindset, frankly.

Muriel 00:54:41 Yeah. So basically the whole antifragile idea, just a different word. That’s what I like.

Andrew 00:54:46 That’s cool. I dealt with that.

Muriel 00:54:49 I’m big on language, um, in my life. Like I I’m really, I hold the language I use with myself to a very high standard of just certain principles that are important to me. So I get hung up on stuff like that, but antifragile is a good one. I love that. Love the premise.

Andrew 00:55:05 Okay, good. We’re down with the premise and we’ll figure out the terms as we go. So I want to zoom back out really quick on, on just the future of work in general. So what I hope to create for the person listening to this is, is sort of a context of, you know, a foundation to think from, because this is one of those big topics that is going to be around for a long time. And we’re all going to have to engage in this topic, whether we like it or not. So I’m hoping we kind of just lay a conceptual foundation for people to think from, and, and start to think for themselves from, um, so to that point, uh, I have a question. So this is not the first time in history that there have been large scale fears around the impact of technology on human jobs and workforce. Uh, I mean going all the way back to the Luddites, right? This is like, I think it’s called the Luddite fallacy, I mean, far, far from it, but it’s probably the best known example for most Americans. Why is this time different or is it different? And if so, why?

Muriel 00:56:00 Okay. Well, first I, so first I want to debunk the idea of the light policy. I do not believe the Luddites were wrong. Actually, if we look at what happened to the actual Luddites, that community of people, they were economically decimated for two generations, we only call it a fallacy because we aren’t the people who had to live with the implications of what happened to them. Um, they, they were right. Their lives were actually destroyed by what happened. So I think that’s what important thing to remember is that history can go on and things can correct. And I actually believe that largely we will come up with solutions and this will not be something that decimates the human experience. So it makes our lives horrible. I think we will. Correct. So what I really care about is the people caught in that transition. Like the Luddites were, um, that, that remains something always front of mind for me, um, the most vulnerable populations, how do we make sure that this transition isn’t brutal for those people? Um, I don’t, I don’t, I’m not a person who believes this is ultimately going to be a bad thing over time. I think we are incredibly inventive and we’re going to come up with some awesome solutions that make this better. I also think work is very imperfect. I do not see it as something we need to protect. I think it is something that we need to improve. And so I think shifts like this can be very positive if we seize that opportunity.

Andrew 00:57:23 Very good point, especially about the, the Luddites not being wrong.

Muriel 00:57:27 That’s my, my, my soap box. I always stand on because everyone talks, Oh yeah, those silly Luddites, but they weren’t so silly. They were right for their own lives.

Andrew 00:57:35 That’s true. They were. Um, so the question is then there’s a lot of people and in a much broader swath of, uh, the workforce than the Luddites, um, there’s a lot of people who have similar concerns today. And when they look at artificial intelligence, they look at how it’s changing things is, is this time different? And if so, why

Muriel 00:57:56 Faster? So I think that is different. I mean, we’re not, humans are great with change. We’re not great with rapid change. Um, people always say, humans are bad with change, but it’s actually, it’s not true. We’re just not good at rapidly changing. We typically have a period of dissonance accepting change. Um, so I think the pace is probably the number one thing that concerns me. Um, but I, I still think that there’s so much we can, we can do within that. And I think that some of the very things that will cause some of the problems we have, the sticky problems we have to solve, I think can also be tools for some really great solutions to make work better. Um, so that’s what I’m focusing on. I think regardless, uh, you know, a lot of these technologies are going to be adopted in ways that replace jobs. So I, I just say let’s get really busy thinking about how we can also use these technologies or whatever other tools we have in our toolkit to make work better, to make opportunities for people. So that’s what I’m working on.

Andrew 00:59:01 No, I love that. And I actually am right there with you. It’s something I’m actively researching right now is these changes at this point are inevitable, you know, automation of many, many jobs or many activity. I should say activities, not jobs because jobs are bigger than activities that is coming. And so there’s going to be these changes and I’m very interested in what do we do to help those people who, who are caught in the, in that transition. So even what do you see? Like what, for someone who’s listening to this, whether they’re, let’s say it’s someone who either wants to go do something about this directly by starting a company like you did, or maybe it’s someone, you know, uh, an executive in a, a large company that has a lot of employees that are, you know, very much on this path that are going to have their roles dramatically affected by these now inevitable trends of technology. What should, what should we do about this?

Muriel 00:59:48 So there’s so much to be due to be done at different levels. Um, so one, one area that I think anyone can make a difference, um, is just helping with the whole awareness piece. So there’s a great story. I I’m going to blank on the source on this one, so you can take it and put it in the footnotes, but there’s a woman in a town in Tennessee. Her town had been an experimental place where they had really fast internet or something. Great connectivity. I forget what, what it was. Um, so her daughter and her daughter’s partner had a couple of kids. They ended up, um, unfortunately being victims of the opiate opioid epidemic. Uh, they weren’t able to have the children anymore. Um, the children needed to go live with this woman. So this woman, because she had to care for the kids, she wasn’t able to keep her job.

Muriel 01:00:42 So in any, you know, in any historical example, we would assume then that, that woman’s life is ruined right there. That would have been kind of the end of the story there. That would have been this sad. This whole family kind of broke down, but what ended up happening is she got hired by some tech company to do some support role in her town. She didn’t have to move. She was able to work from home. Um, she was able to care for her kids and she was making more money than she did before. And she actually loved what she did. She loves her new job. So I think that’s like the poster child of like this done. Right. Um, okay. Now for that to event possible though, the most important piece in that whole puzzle, um, outside of just those opportunities existing was that this woman needed some awareness of that.

Muriel 01:01:27 Even being an option for her. And I, I see so many interesting organizations that have popped up. I see so many interesting initiatives that different governments are doing like a local level or national level. I see so many ways that people could be providing more economic security, your jobs created for themselves. And it seems like we’re just not getting the solutions into the right hands. So one thing I just encourage people to do is just be people who are just vigilantly, looking for opportunities and connecting people with those. I, I was riding in an Uber the other day and this woman starts telling me about her dream and what she, and what she wanted to do. And I had just seen this thing in Chicago about grants for women of color, who were starting small businesses. And I got her connected with it and she has funding.

Muriel 01:02:14 And now she’s starting a company like there’s, there’s things like that that can happen if we’re, if we’re keeping our eyes open. And I think there’s so much that we can be doing. Um, instead of just talking about the problem all the time, like, look at how you can connect people with information. Now, I think there’s better tools we can have that do that on a macro level. But one thing I’m just committed to is just being aware of all of those opportunities out there for people and telling people about them. That’s a big thing. Anytime someone’s done something interesting. I think a big problem, um, in, in kind of any impact space is just helping get the word out. So that’s one piece. This is just simple. Um, if, if I was somebody in a massive kind of leadership level, I think there is a piece that has to be policy for navigating this.

Muriel 01:02:59 And there’s a piece that I think are just practical solutions. I think we’re kidding ourselves. If we think we’ll get through a massive transition, like what’s coming without some kind of safety net for people who are most impacted. I think we can do our best efforts at rescaling. I think there is going to need to be something. So that’s one piece, so less optimistic piece. Um, but I think that there’s lots of examples of things like that working. Um, and I think we’ll navigate that. Okay. But I think, I think it’s good that no matter what people’s political leanings are, I think it’s good that the term UBI came up in a selection cycle, just so people start to be familiar with those kinds of ideas, because I do think something like that is coming in the future and I don’t even necessarily think it will be from a political party that we would expect.

Muriel 01:03:45 I think it’s just something that’s going to be a pretty universally agreed upon idea at some point, um, outside of that though, if you’re just practically managing people and leading people, I think the more that you actually get to know the DNA of who your people are and what they can offer, um, the more solutions you will find. So that’s something I I’ve worked with a lot of, um, like government leaders and executives of companies. And it’s amazing how much we look at just like what we’re trying to accomplish. And we’re not looking at who the people are and it’s because it’s hard. And so anytime I’m working with people that manage teams, I’ve been challenging them, like, do you actually really know your people, like everything that they could bring to the table? Have you tried to actually capture that and think about how that could be tied to opportunities in your company? And I even have this model that I have people who lead teams do. It’s a, I don’t know if you’re familiar, it’s really boring stuff, but like job analysis, work analysis, have you heard of that?

Andrew 01:04:45 I’ve only heard it mentioned. That’s all I know.

Muriel 01:04:48 So it is this old school method. So in 1952, something like that, 1954, there was a method that they, the U S army started doing, which was basically trying to sort people into occupy, uh, occupations within the military. So they were trying to figure out like, okay, well, what are the knowledge, skills, abilities, other characteristics that I need to be effective, um, in this role. And they came up with this kind of taxonomy of like a role and all the things you would need to be great in that role. And then they started slotting people into those positions. So that was the first time really that we saw something like that outside of I actually the Imperial core in China, many thousands or a few thousand years, a couple of years before I did that too. Um, but not a couple thousand 1000 years before, but anyway, so

Andrew 01:05:37 There’s was the, it was the exam that anyone could take if they wanted to enter the government. Right. And then if you could pass the test, which was brutally hard, it didn’t matter where you came from, you were in.

Muriel 01:05:45 So it wasn’t necessarily a test actually. It’s just, it was a way of, um, catalog, cataloging, work opportunities. So basically what they have done since then now is all labor data in the world is still structured in that same way. It’s still a catalog of there’s these like occupational categories, there’s jobs that not there’s tasks, you can do. There’s knowledge, skills, abilities, other characteristics. And that’s how we think about jobs. And so when we’re writing job descriptions, even when we’re hiring people in companies, and we’re thinking about job requirements, it’s still is all very reflective of that model, that we’re just kind of slotting people into our catalog. So one thing that I’ve been working on for a long time and been very passionate about is how do we actually flip that model on its head? And think instead about if I have this skill, what are all of the, what’s the wide constellation of opportunities that would open up to me. Um, and so that’s a whole different way of structuring data from like a workforce perspective. So instead of just having taxonomies of data, we have ontologies, which means it’s interconnected. We see the linkages between anything. So from a government

Andrew 01:06:54 Pause for a second, what’s the difference between a taxonomy and an

Muriel 01:06:57 So a taxonomy is like a catalog. So think species of animals. So we’d be like, you know, cats, big cats, tigers, okay. You get like the tiers there, it’s like a tiered catalog. Um, if we have an ontology, it’s

Andrew 01:07:11 All tigers are big cats, but not all big cats are tigers.

Muriel 01:07:13 I don’t know. I’m not honestly an expert on tigers. So I feel like you’re gonna have to bring someone else on for that. So, but then on the other end of the spectrum is we could have something like an ontology, um, which is where we’re, we’re seeing kind of what we call nodes. So that’s like one, so that could be like a tiger. And then we have edges between nodes. So that could be like the strength of the relationship. So we’d have like a tiger and then we’d have like a house cat and we’d see like how strongly related they were. So that’s the, and then it ends up looking like a big constellation or spider web. You’ve seen network, analytic databases. There we go. So those are the two different ways we could think about structuring data. I’m trying to get people to switch to ontology.

Muriel 01:07:56 That was my soap box for years. I worked with a lot of governments to do that. Um, I have a tool, actually. That’s a finalist for grants. If I get it, I can, I’m going to make the tool that I developed actually opensource to anyone to use. Um, but what I, yes, it is. Yeah. So say more about that. Yeah. So, okay. So whether we’re talking about a team in an organization or a math and, or the entire workforce in Chile, I think we are so much better prepared to help people see new job opportunities. If their job goes away or to see more opportunities within an organization, if they’re insecure about their future there, if we, instead of just thinking about jobs and the requirements for jobs, we have an interconnected view of what are all of the ways I can apply a skill.

Muriel 01:08:42 So we, what this tool basically does is it follows this very boring process of, Oh, wow. I just realized now how far away I jumped from what I was getting. So back to job and work analysis, that’s how boring it is. I can’t even get through talking about it, but it’s a useful tool. So job analysis though, is basically a way that we go through a job and actually capture at a very nuance level. What are all the components in this job? Knowledge, skills, abilities, other characteristics, KSAs. I’ve said that so many times on this podcast, that’s the world I live in is KSAs. Um,

Andrew 01:09:17 And so that just make that concrete for people. That’s like, let’s, let’s do an example of that. So let’s imagine someone who the job is a computer programmer, right. Can you take that example and just give us a simple version of it? What are the KSA and owes for say a programmer?

Muriel 01:09:31 So knowledge you’re right. Knowledge is something that you it’s like information that you learned, which is, I think going to be the least interesting part of our KSAs has moved forward with technology skills is like something that you learn how to do. Um, and so maybe knowledge would be like, okay, I know that if I balance like fat with acid, when I’m cooking, then it’s going to taste better. Skill would be like, actually getting a feel for how to do that. And practically cook something ability would be something more innate. So like, Oh, well I just have a really good sense of taste. Like I always have, I’m really able to just get a feel for what people are going to like, and then other characteristics could be that you also, um, like you also happen to have kind of a quirky look to you. So you’re like perfect for a celebrity chef. Like you just have that quirky look that just kind of fits that doesn’t really necessarily directly fit, but it like helps you be successful there. So when we’re thinking about any kind of task or job, we’re generally drawing upon those four things and a long list of those four things, um,

Andrew 01:10:37 Got it. So you can kind of, it was almost a taxonomy. I play here, have you have these KSAs at the bottom level that then roll up, you know, you sample from knowledge and skills and abilities and so forth and to compose a task basically, and then you have, or a task or an activity. And then you have just basically this portfolio of these KSAs, I guess, and at the end of the day, you end up calling that giant portfolio, a job with air quotes around, is that right?

Muriel 01:11:02 Yeah, that’s fair. And so instead of actually structuring the data, so it’s the same data that we’re getting. It’s the same case data instead of structuring that in the catalog where that’s at the bottom and that’s where we get our details, but we have a job above it. And we don’t look at KSAs between jobs. We’re just interested in them within jobs. Instead. Now we’re saying, well, let’s make that the focus of this entire database. And let’s look at all the connections across these, all of these cases and then how that could relate to a task opportunity or a job opportunity. It’s just a different way of capturing the same idea, but it, materially changed is how we can think about a work transition

Andrew 01:11:41 For sure. So sort of try and make a really overly simplistic visual metaphor. It’s almost like a taxonomy is imagining it like a ladder being structured, like a ladder or one rolls up to the other to the other. And then the other one is it looks more like a spiderweb. Yeah, that’s fair. Yeah. Okay, cool. And so if by, by shifting from the ladder to the spiderweb, you can have way many more transition points and abilities to adapt than this very rigid, hierarchical, vertical. It’s like, well, you’re just, you’re your ladder is no longer. Your letter has gone by, by now. It’s like, Oh, I have this Lily pad and got to making so many metaphors mixed up. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. That’s how my brain works. So now I have some node at some point in the web, and then I can, instead of being dependent on one ladder that may no longer exist because it’s now totally automated. Now I can pivot from this one spot in the, in the web to another thing that’s connected to it, even if it’s in a different, you know, job or role, but it still leverages those same, that same cocktail of KSAs that I have. Is that the idea here?

Muriel 01:12:43 Yeah, that is. And, uh, so basically the tool that I was working on for a while that hopefully very soon will be open source and anyone can use it. It just basically creates a common language of how do we collect that KSA data. And then it gives you a tool to structure it, um, along with other data and opportunities in your workplace or at a workforce level. Um, and so that was really important to me to do because I saw so many incredible entrepreneurs or people with not-for-profits or people doing government initiatives that everything they were trying to do was more difficult because of how labor data was structured. So a lot of the tools in this space, they rely upon labor data and labor data is just not structured for that kind of proactive shifting idea that is behind a lot of solutions people have in the future work. If I basically decided as like people are not going to build as good of tools to solve this problem until somebody fixes us. So that’s what I worked on for a long time throughout grad school. It was really fun. It’s a horrible way to try to make money, but it’s something the world needs. So open source tool soon, hopefully it’s finalist for grant. We’ll see what happens.

Andrew 01:13:48 Alright. Fingers crossed fingers crossed. I love that. So, and I think, you know, as I’m listening to you, I’m thinking about this issue a lot right now in capitalism, there is a pattern that is predictable, which is that industrialization or commodification, which automation is a force driving, um, unlocks new higher order. Meaning if you have automation, which is this, you know, this trend is forest. Now that is driving many, many roles, sorry, many activities, the activities that make up many roles today tried to use the right terms here. So there are many activities that largely compose jobs today that are going to be automated. So they’re going to become effectively commodities that are no longer, um, worth having a human do, because you can have a machine, do it for far cheaper, more reliably, et cetera, et cetera. That’s the scary bit, right? That that scares people’s identity and sense of where they are and what they can bring to the world. The pattern, the underlying climactic pattern in capitalism though, is that, that type of thing now unlocks new higher order systems that like now you can do new things because of that, that you couldn’t do before. And so it seems like really what there is, is helping people navigate the transition from that lower order work they were doing to the new, higher order work that is now on the, that is now on the menu because the thing they used to spend their time doing, they don’t have to do any

Muriel 01:15:08 Right. And that’s honestly, I think most future of our companies are navigation companies. Like that’s what we’re working on in different domains. Um, and you even see a lot of future where companies using words like the GPS of work in their marketing. And I think that makes sense, like my company, for example, uh, we’re, we’re mostly interested in just how do we help people just see what they need to be learning? Like how do, how do we help people just see the direction they need to be going? Like that’s a navigation, um, process as well. And we’re, even though we’re more focused on like the tangible, like how do we actually get people engaged in their jobs today? But even if we’re thinking about longterm tools that are focused more on like longterm labor shifts, I think that’s the same thing they’re doing. Um, I also think one big piece and one area, if anyone’s listening and they want to start a future of our company, I think something that’s missing is not like places to learn or like information to learn.

Muriel 01:16:03 It’s actually connecting people with the right information. Like I think we’ve seen that having endless access to information has not made us smarter. There’s some sense making that needs to happen. There’s some constraints around that of figuring out like what’s actually the best use of my time right now. So I think there’s a lot more we need to do around just pure learning and helping people focus on what learning makes most sense for them. I think that relates to kind of the story with the woman who ended up at that, with that job that allowed her to take care of her grandkids. Um, I think that there’s so much, like there’s so much that people could be doing for themselves. That actually would be positive for them, but it’s just, how do we, how do we connect people with that? How do we help people make sense of where to go and what’s right for them and what’s the next best step.

Muriel 01:16:49 One thing you definitely don’t want to do if you’re, if you are a coal miner whose job just got disrupted, the last thing you want to do is invest time and money and learning something. If it’s not even going to be a good opportunity for you. So that’s a, that’s a paralyzing situation to find yourself in. Especially if everyone in your community was a coal miner, your parents were coal. You don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing. Of course not like it’s, it’s scary. And so the more resources we have that do navigate people, I think that’s going to help a lot with the transition.

Andrew 01:17:21 One question that I wanted to ask you is the question that where this came from in a conversation was what is it that actually makes a, an experience, but particularly a work experience, engaging, uh, meaningful, exciting, right? A lot of the things that the show focuses on. And, um, I’ve heard a lot of different takes on this and there’s many, many models out there, right? You’ve got self determination theory. You’ve got, um, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, his work, you’ve got, you know, the autonomy mastery purpose stuff. There, there’s a lot of, you know, there’s kind of some general agreement around the underlying psychological needs that need to be fulfilled. I’m gonna use the abbreviation ramp, which I’m stealing blatantly from 15 five, uh, which is relatedness, autonomy, mastery, and purpose, uh, check out their stuff. It’s really good. I’ll link to in the show notes, but I’m popping up a level in terms of actual, you know, putting that into action.

Andrew 01:18:09 And what do you actually focus on? The model that we’ve been playing with is, is what we’re calling, what we’ve been loosely calling the arm model, like you have an arm and an arm. And so, uh, basically the A’s activities, uh, are, is relationships and M is mission or meaning. And so the idea being that the things that make a work experience fulfilling are first and foremost, what do you literally, what are you doing all day, the activities you’re doing and do you enjoy them? Can you get into flow in them? Um, are, you know, are they things you want to do all day, basically? Uh, secondly, is who are you spending your time with and what does that environment like? So that’s sort of relationships of your coworkers, uh, as well as culture, the cultural environment you’re doing it in. Uh, and then the third one is, is sort of what is, where’s this all going, right? Which is sort of the, meaning the mission. Um, you know, if we’re successful, does it, do I feel good about that? Um, so that’s a super simplistic model that I’ve been playing with. And I’m just curious, like as an actual expert, he knows what’s up, not me. What do you think about that? And how would you modify that?

Muriel 01:19:10 I think I remember you sharing that with me when we had dinner recently at that very good restaurant. Should I give up? That was a good restaurant, um, duck, duck goat for anybody dropped by duck, duck out. There you go.

Andrew 01:19:25 Super, super yummy, very good Chinese food. Yeah.

Muriel 01:19:28 And lots of vegetarian options, despite the name for all the veterans.

Andrew 01:19:32 True. We did not. We’ve made veggie that night. It was very good. Okay. Anyways, back to this.

Muriel 01:19:37 So I love the model. I think it’s actually, I love how simple it is and I actually think there’s a lot of truth to it. The piece that I think I’m obsessed with right now, I would put as a foundational piece beneath that, which is just insight. And that, that has become my obsession lately. Because every time I look at models of how to get people engaged at work models of how to get people, to learn models of how to help people navigate change models, to make people future ready. I keep coming back to you first have to have some level of self awareness, some self insight, some ability to create a concept of yourself, an identity. Um, everyone, like we all are the protagonist in our own story. And I think we really forget that when we’re trying to make people engaged at work or when we’re trying to help fulfill, fulfill that work. I think we really forget that people are the own, their own protagonists. Um, and so I would put that under that, and then I love the model.

Andrew 01:20:37 No, I, this is great. I love it. So let’s, let’s take a look at a couple of minutes and actually do a well, we’re going to put me in the hot seat for a second. We’re going to turn the tables here, cause this is always interesting and fun, and this will also make it concrete for the listener. Uh, and plus I’m just curious, so we’re going to do it anyway. Um, so I am going through this process right now where, uh, like you said, underneath all of this is sort of self insight. And I think like a lot of people, um, I mean, well, I I’ve had the good fortune to have access to a lot of, uh, tools, assessments, uh, mechanisms, whatever you want to call it for. Self-insight right. So psychometric tests, things like that. And I’ll tell you, the place I’m at right now is I am, I have this giant pile of data, ostensibly useful information about myself, and I have no idea what to do with all of it.

Andrew 01:21:25 And so I’m literally looking at a note on the other side of my screen right here, where I’m trying to compile all this stuff and synthesize it into something useful. And I’m like, I’ll tell you some of the things that are in here. There’s the via character strengths test. There’s the disc assessment, the Colby assessment, strengths finder, strength based leadership, big five personality, the imperative purpose tool, uh, spark type, um, any gram, uh, genius, genius. Like there’s all this stuff I’ve got like 15 of these things. So, and I know cause I’ve had other people talk to me about this, that I’m not the only person that who’s crazy in this way. So what do crazy people like me do in a situation?

Muriel 01:22:00 Well, first of all, thank you for helping keep the lights on for all of us. Psychometricians out there. It’s very kind of personally Bankroller lifestyles. Um, I do appreciate it. Um, that is honestly part of why we created anthill because I think there is so much beauty in compiling, a lot of different insights. I think there’s a lot we can learn from each of those, but I think it can become a mess without some kind of sense making that brings it all together. And so I think any time you’re working on learning all of that about yourself, there’s only so much that suggestible for us at any specific time point. And I think we have this desire to get to like, what’s the most important thing and with a tool I can’t heal, you can, I believe, but when it’s you, I would just say, pick some, look for a theme.

Muriel 01:22:48 Humans are great sense makers. That’s one of the, I think most difficult to automate skills, look for a theme and just nudge yourself with it. Continuously get like a name plate, but that people used to have on desks and like the eighties and just write the word. Like maybe you need to be a better, which you don’t, you’re an incredible listener. I should be able to assist so you can listen and just look at it every day. That is how you would actually get the most out of those. I think the biggest problem is that we come up with like these, like this massive strategy of character change and all these things we’re going to work on when really like we’re going to do best. If we find an important thing and we give ourselves some micro dose reminder, um, that we focus on. So I, I think, you know, every year I choose a word of the year, um, which a lot of people have started to do.

Muriel 01:23:33 I’ve done it since I was a little girl. I don’t know when it became a trend, but it helps me so much because it’s so simple. And it’s one of those things that in those moments, when you are your lowest self you’re, so below the line, you’re, you know, you’re hungry, you’re tired, you’re frustrated. You can still bring a word to mind. It’s hard to bring like a whole picture of everything you want to work on and everything you are. So you can bring one word to mind. You always can. And so that’s what I try to always encourage people who are like you. One of those self-improvement ninjas who’s focused on everything is just try to synthesize it down to one thing. And then as soon as that feels embedded in who you are, move on. And that’s really what nudging technologies like anthill are, are focused on automating, but it’s something you can do for yourself in that way with all the tests you have. But I know you’re going to want the best thing. So you’re going to, you’re going to kill yourself, trying to figure out which thing to should focus on, but just pick one, just pick one.

Andrew 01:24:28 Okay. That’s I’m very glad you said that and thank you for the advice. I will listen to that advice and take it. So you’re telling me that basically I built a crappy version of anthill in my name.

Muriel 01:24:37 Yeah. You built like part of it, but you didn’t. Yeah. You made it way too complicated, but that’s okay. That’s okay.

Andrew 01:24:43 Okay, cool. So when can I use actual anthill?

Muriel 01:24:47 We might throw a bone in your way. We’re working only with companies right now, but we do, we would like to have a user facing version, um, out eventually. So I’ll keep you posted,

Andrew 01:24:58 Well, you know, I’m a nerd for this stuff. So if you want to beta user person,

Muriel 01:25:02 If you run some tests, why not? Anything

Andrew 01:25:06 You’re the best. You’re the two kinds. Okay. So, um, okay. So that’s, I’m glad we covered that. Thank you. Uh, cause I honestly, I’ve been, not only making myself crazy with this, but also for some reason, a lot of people I know are in a similar place right now. And this has just been coming up a lot lately where people are, uh, bringing up these questions and they’re saying like, what do I do with this information? Right. I have too much information going to, sense-making like, you’re talking about like I have the Colby and the StrengthsFinder and the, this and the, that. And like, I don’t know what to do with all of it. So it sounds like the takeaway is boil it down, pick one thing at a time, work on that and keep, keep stick consistently with that one thing until it’s normal for you and then

Muriel 01:25:45 Yeah. Or use anthill way,

Andrew 01:25:48 Or you saying Hill, I mean it’s available. I think the people who are into this topic are gonna use it. I will use it. Yeah.

Muriel 01:25:54 Yeah. It’s, it’s been such a fun thing to work on just because I’m like you, I also really enjoy these. Um, and a lot of, and it’s most personality types are very drawn to something that helps them learn about themselves. That’s very rewarding for us. Um, a healthy level of narcissism that we all have. Uh, and so I think, I think it can be really fun to learn about yourself. And I think the more that we look at it as like I’m on this fund journey, I’m running this experiment on how to be a better person, like, and just take a little of the pressure off and be like, if there’s just one thing I’m focusing on, that’s, that’s a lot like think like life is long. Like give yourself a little bit of a break and just give yourself one thing. He can’t, he can’t do it all in a day.

Andrew 01:26:37 Very good advice for people like me to hear. So thank you. Uh, here’s a different question. And this is one that, that also came up as I was talking to people in my life, getting ready for this conversation over the last few weeks, we have so many problems in the world, right? And we’re, we’re perhaps more aware of the problems that we have than we ever have before. Thank you, you know, to media and the internet and communications technology. So maybe we have just as many problems, maybe we have do problems, whatever, but it’s in all of our faces. And the question is why ought someone work on this issue? Like the future of work relative to so many of the other pressing problems, like for example, the climate crisis or you know, the food system or diversity, you know, pick, pick your, pick your thing here.

Muriel 01:27:18 Okay. I feel really passionate about this actually. So Andrew has spent years measuring individual differences on so many metrics. I can tell, I can assure you that there is someone out there for every problem. There is someone that’s going to be fired up about every problem and like for racially trying to solve it, if they’re living their best life. So I would not worry about any shifts. I would actually do the thing that fires you up. Trust me, there are lots of different people out there. We are not all Andrew. Scott’s go sadly. And so pick the thing that you actually are going to identify with. If we don’t identify with something, as I’ve said, this whole podcast, we are not engaged with it. We do not have climate scientists who aren’t excited to be climate scientists. That’s not going to help. Um, so I think practically when you are, if you’re raising children, if you are mentoring someone, if you are closely connected with anyone’s development, as a friend, a partner, whatever, encourage that person to be fully themselves, as much as possible, push everyone in the direction of their own true North and then get busy doing the thing you’re actually excited about.

Andrew 01:28:31 I think that’s wonderful advice. How do you actually, when you advise people about that, how do you advise that they go about that? Cause there’s a lot of advice about how to, you know, quote, find your purpose, find your true North, find your, whatever you want to call it. How do you, how have you done it and how have you seen that be effective when you’ve advised people?

Muriel 01:28:46 It’s a PR it’s a process. Um, I, one of the rules I have, so I have a group of, uh, young female scientists, uh, that I’ve mentored for awhile. Um, and a lot of times they come to me and they would like, okay, I’m thinking about quitting my job. I’m not fulfilled. And I would always ask them like, Oh, what’s the bigger, yes. Like what are you? What’s your big, yes. That you’re going toward. And they’d be like, no, no, I just don’t like my job. And I’d be like, Oh, so what’s the thing that you’re going to do now. And they’d be like, no, I just don’t like my job and it’s, and I totally think there’s a time and place to quit, adopt to quit a job. I’ve done it. Um, I get that, you know, our mental health is paramount and you’ve got to protect that at all costs.

Muriel 01:29:28 But I think sometimes we get so trapped in this idea of like focusing on what we’re not liking in a situation. And then we have this ambiguous fantasy that we’re heading toward where instead I really encourage people when they’re in painful situations to actually sit in that and see what is a contrast to that. I actually think some of our best times of figuring out what we care about is in seasons that are a little painful. And I think that too often in this discussion, we are encouraging people to run away from pain. And I, I will tell you in my life, all of the best things that have ever happened in terms of clarity for me, or direction for me have come out of a lot of pain and a lot of stuckness. And I think we need to embrace that a little bit more than we do. Um, but also protect your mental health in the process is my caveat there. So until you have a bigger, yes, I actually encourage people to sit in the discomfort. I think it’s an incredible motivator. I think it’s very hard to go from good to amazing. I think it’s a lot easier to go from painful to amazing. Um, and so that’s what I mostly encouraged. I think

Andrew 01:30:40 Just because of like the relative differences, bigger, like going from something that’s terrible to something that’s good, feels amazing.

Muriel 01:30:46 I just think of principles of human motivation. Um, we’re, we’re difficult creatures to motivate. Uh, we get very comfortable, very easily and typically we’re not actually motivated to go after something great. We’re just motivated to, to relieve pain. Yeah. I just think it’s a better place to come from finding your purpose. That’s why I think some of the people I am most inspired by have had the most difficult backgrounds. I mean, people who have been abused, I see one person I really admire what they’ve done. You never know it. Getting to know them. They were trafficked as a child. Um, people who grew up in poverty, people who have come from countries where you would never expect them to have access to the kind of education they were able to get for themselves. Um, I mean, there’s, I think that’s, we see that overcoming a lot because of that principle of motivation.

Andrew 01:31:36 This is such a fascinating thing. And it reminds me of some of the conversations that you and I had. And that also went on in the larger group when you and I were both fellows at singularity U together a couple of years back. Um, and one of the questions that I remember came up that I don’t think ever really a clear answer emerged, but I’m curious if you have an updated take, as you said, many people have had to overcome some tremendous difficulties and challenges in their life. And we find that very inspiring, right? They’ve had to overcome trafficking or lack of education or opportunity or, you know, whatever the, whatever the case may be. Um, and that is inspiring. And also, you know, there’s a lot of difficulty there and, and um, you wish that people didn’t have to do that, but for people who haven’t ironically for, for people who haven’t had that challenge, sometimes it seems like they are the most lacking in directionality in, in a sense of purpose because they haven’t had that thing that happened to them that they had to overcome. And that gave them that sense of meaning for people like that. What do you, what have you seen to be effective in terms of them tapping into this, this sense?

Muriel 01:32:34 I am, it gets back to something we talked about earlier, which I encouraged him to break a routine. Um, I think a lot of times, so you can have kind of your mirror neurons work pretty well. We can experience something through someone else’s experience. And I think exposing yourself to more things. I think the people who have it, the toughest in life from a psychological perspective are the people who had a really easy cause she lives and they’ve only ever hung out with people just like them. I think that’s a really sad way to live. And you’ve probably met people like that. There’s no real, no real lows. There’s no real highs. They’re just kind of bopping along. Um, I think the only way to break that is to get out of your routine, break your routine, um, do something that feels markedly uncomfortable for you and different for you, but you have to, that’s a personal choice that you have to make, right.

Muriel 01:33:23 But we all have our, you know, we all have things that work for us and things that work against us. We all come with a constellation of advantages and disadvantages some way more privileged than others. Um, but I would argue that even some of the things that we think of as like, Oh, that person should have it figured out they have every privilege you could possibly have those people don’t always make it happen. Um, and I think it comes back to, to what we’re talking about now. I think there’s, there’s a challenge component that is critical for growth. And I think that if we had an equation for growth, like whatever is in that equation would have to be multiplied by challenge and challenges. Zero. I, I don’t think you’re ever going to grow.

Andrew 01:34:03 You mentioned way back in the beginning. Um, you’re writing a book.

Muriel 01:34:06 Yes. But that is still, that is still so under wrap, we don’t even have our working title, but I have two awesome coauthors. One is an academic and one is an executive at a large tech company. Um, and we’re, we’re all from, we’re from three different generations. Um, bringing a few different perspectives, talking about the future of communication. Um, and we have this model we’ve developed of basically kind of getting back to what I was talking about in the very beginning, as you said of how do we actually start to understand each other, um, as we’re navigating all of this incredible change in this pace of change, it will never be more important for us to really understand each other and to be just really competent communicators with one another and to start to even relieve some of each other’s suffering through giving each other a chance to be understood. Um, so we were writing it in a really fun way. It’s kind of a big story. We were profiling a lot of people that we worked with world leaders, executives, some, some characters all throughout, um, to kind of make a point. We hope it mostly just reads like a fun behind the curtains peek into a lot of really interesting lives. Um, but there’s a model throughout there that we think is really an important model for anyone, um, going into the future, the future of work. So we’re excited about it.

Andrew 01:35:25 Do you guys have a target? Uh, did you just start a, where are you in the process?

Muriel 01:35:28 So we have been for a long time talking about these ideas kind of, um, yeah, collaborating, but we are now finally shifting into making it real with the deal and agents and all that fun jazz. So yeah.

Andrew 01:35:43 That’s so exciting. Good for you. Good for you. Congratulations. I cannot wait to read it again. If you want, uh, early readers or drafts or anything like that, I’d be stoked to, uh, to, to get early access to your thinking. So one question is what is something in recent memory? And that could be the last week, or it could be the last, you know, two years. What is a change that you’ve made in your life that you think has had an outsized impact on either the quality of your life, your effectiveness, whatever the case may be, but small change. Yeah.

Muriel 01:36:13 Oh, I think the biggest one for me is getting up an hour earlier and spending my first hour working on something that I’m super passionate about, that it doesn’t no one else is expecting a deliverable from me on that thing that has been huge for me. And sometimes I work on things that are very personal and sometimes they work on things that are actually just related to what I’m I’m working on. But too, it’s kind of that with budgeting that pay yourself first mentality. I just started doing that with my time and it just sets a tone for the day. That is really awesome for me.

Andrew 01:36:43 Yeah. I love that. Cause we were, we, uh, I think before we hit record, we were, we were talking about Warren buffet and Charlie Munger and it reminds me of Charlie Munger, his whole thing about sell yourself the first, your first and best hour of the day.

Muriel 01:36:54 There we go. Yes. Is that where you got that? Maybe? I don’t know. One of my favorite videos on YouTube is the one it’s a black and white video of Charlie Munger for 40 minutes. Just explaining mental models in a totally monotone voice. No illustrations just reciting them. If anyone needs something to do on a Friday night, I highly recommend you check that out. So I don’t know. I probably did get that inspiration from them and didn’t realize,

Andrew 01:37:20 Yeah, no, it’s, it’s great. It’s the, uh, I think it’s his famous speech on the psychology human misjudgment, um, which also goes to the other book. That’s sitting on my desk right now, which I highly recommend. Um, I’m nerding out on this right now. Not done yet, but it’s called seeking wisdom from Darwin to Munger. And it’s written by a guy named Peter beveling and this is one of these books that I’ve been meaning to read for years, but it’s like a condensed is I feel like this is one of those books where it’s like, if Charlie Munger, if you bought it were able to bottle his brain up into something. This would be like,

Muriel 01:37:48 I will check that out. Thank you.

Andrew 01:37:52 Unfortunately, there’s no audio book I’ve wished there was, but uh, it’s like one of those dents on it. It’s one of those books where I’m like, I’m going to be really glad I read this. I can tell you, you have such a level of self awareness and, and nuanced thinking who or what has so profoundly shaped your thinking.

Muriel 01:38:10 So many AMS. I mean, there’s so many people who inspire me, it’s it, it feels like unfair to try to encapsulate it. Um, or, or maybe, I mean, I think actually the broad answer is I it’s a very, very rare person. I come across that I don’t immediately find a reason to be inspired by them. Like I actually think there is something really, really incredible in everyone. And I think, I, I think I learned that from my dad. My dad has this deep appreciation for literally everyone and I saw him live that way, um, growing up and yeah, it, I think that that’s why it feels difficult to answer that question. Hmm, outsized impact recently. Um, I was really, I think profoundly touched by, I never, never got to meet her. Unfortunately she passed away last year by Mary Oliver. Uh, I, I can be a bit too kind of in my head, cerebral a little robotic, sometimes moving through, executing on all the objectives I have for myself.

Muriel 01:39:13 Um, so I intentionally started to insert into my life poetry and even dorky, there we go. Awesome. Even very Andrew just showed me a mug for anyone hearing my reaction. Um, so I S I started to be drawn to things like poetry. And even I started this as the dorkiest thing about me. I started doing needle point because I was like, okay, that’s totally opposite from being in my head. I’m just working with my hands, stitching something for who knows what reason. Um, and I think Mary Oliver, since I started reading her work, have you ever read anything by Mary Oliver? Oh, I highly recommend so if you want to want to read some poetry, I highly recommend devotions. Uh, that’s a collection of a lot of her best works. Uh, there’s one in particular on desks that I’m going to send you right when we hang out, because

Andrew 01:39:59 That’s beautiful. Okay. Thank you.

Muriel 01:40:02 Then if you want to read some of her essays, uh, her book upstream, I really, really love there’s. There’s one essay in there about Emerson, who is one of the giants in my life, who I’m always inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Um, she, you have to be an incredible writer to write about Emerson because Emerson was such a good writer, but that essay that she wrote on REM Emerson, for some reason, it had such a deep impact on me. I highlight check it out. But I think the reason I love Mary Oliver is that she has given me more of an appreciation for the little things around me, which I think I lost in kind of maybe getting a PhD, kind of drove it out of me, kind of having a lot of work goals, drove it out of me, but she’s given me this appreciation again for little things and like these, this layer to life. And I think those are the people that I feel most inspired by. It’s not even people in my field are people who I really respect intellectually. Sometimes it’s the people that cause me to pause and think about something totally outside of what feels important to me at that time. I think those are the people I’m most inspired by lately. So that’s a really long if Mary Oliver crew at all

Andrew 01:41:11 Mary Oliver and her homies, I love it. It’s funny as you were saying that, I was like, wait a minute. That sounds familiar because the third book on my desk is this book. It’s called poetry of presence. And it’s a book I got at, um, a meditation retreat. I went on a few months ago and, uh, one of my favorite teachers there at the retreat, uh, gave it to me. And, uh, I was like, Oh, that sounds so familiar. And I think I did hear a Mary Oliver poem when I was there because she read from this book. And so I’m going to, if we’re going to, we’re going to bring some Mary Oliver into this conversation right now. So can I, can I read you read you a Mary Oliver poem? So it’s the poem. The poem is called when I am among the trees.

Muriel 01:41:48 I know, I know. I don’t think I can recite the whole thing from memory, but probably close. Go ahead.

Andrew 01:41:55 Okay. So it says, it goes what I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust equally the beach, the Oaks in the Pines. They give up such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they saved me and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself in which I have goodness and discernment and never hurry through the world, but walk slowly and bow often around me, the trees stir in their leaves and call out, stay awhile. The light flows from their branches and they call again, it’s simple. They say, and you two have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light and to shine.

Muriel 01:42:35 Oh, I love that. That’s so good. That’s so good. One of her, um, one of her most famous lines, it’s at the end of a poem, uh, quite a beautiful one that you should read, um, is she says, listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life? And I think is a good future of work poem because I do think that there, there is a lot right now in workplaces that is breathing just a little and calling it a life.

Andrew 01:43:08 I feel like that has got to be, that is the perfect place to end this conversation. I mean, that’s a mic drop moment right there. I tell you to grab the mic, but if the headset you’re wearing drop it, Thank you so, so much for this conversation for sharing yourself and also for everything you’re doing in the world, you are someone who inspires me and, uh, it’s been, you know, obviously it’s privileged to have you on the show and, um, I’m just grateful for you having you in my life as a friend as well. So thank you. First of all. Um, and we’re can the listener, if people want to engage with you in your work, where would you, where would you send them?

Muriel 01:43:39 Yeah, if I would check out ant Hill ai.com, we’re going to have a lot more coming up there soon in terms of resources. We just went live recently. Um, and then anyone who wants to actually chat with me, if you

Muriel 01:43:52 Heard me say anything that you want to get involved with, uh, I’m always open to hearing from anyone at Mirial at anthill, ai.com.

Andrew 01:43:59 Okay. I love it. And, uh, last question. Is there any, any requests you have the listener or anything you want to leave us with,

Muriel 01:44:06 Please, please, please make, make understanding yourself and what you really need from life a priority and learn how to competently communicate that to the people in your life. I think the more people who do that, the better this world will be beautiful.

Andrew 01:44:29 All right. Well, Muriel again, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure and I’m super excited for what you’re doing. Keep it up.

Muriel 01:44:35 Thank you. Thank you. It’s so much fun to talk to you always. So thanks for having this great show too.

This is the second half of my conversation with Rian Doris & Conor Murphy of the Flow Research Collective. We discuss Flow, which is defined as an optimal state of consciousness and is considered to be the optimal experience of life.

This episode helps you to understand and increase your time in flow, so you can get the most out of every aspect of your life. Flow dramatically increases every measure of performance you can imagine, as well as your subjective quality of life experience.

You may want to listen to part one of the conversation first, but this second half also is quite actionable and can stand on its own.

In this conversation we discuss:

• Clear goals
• Levels of goals
• Convergent & divergent tasks
• Context switch
• Can we actually multitask?
• Strategic thinking vs. Convergent thinking
• Flow is a game of attention
• Flow triggers
• The golden rule of flow
• Mindfulness, gratitude, and flow
• How to gain autonomy
• Vital engagement
• Passion & purpose
• Deliberate practice and flow
• The challenge/skills balance
• How to create an environment that is more conducive to flow

Enjoy!

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES

Transcript

Transcripts may contain typos. With some episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Rian 00:01:37 Another one I think that’s worth touching on is clear goals and it’s super helpful, I think for knowledge work specifically. So, um, I mean, it’s, it’s basic, but essentially clear goals is just having a very clear, specific goal for whatever task that it is you’re engaging with or doing at the moments when the goal is clear, the mind doesn’t kind of wander you don’t go into high level analytical mode of kind of being concerned about exactly what it is that you’re supposed to be doing and what the purpose of it is. But you’re able to just kind of focus, hone in and drop straight into whatever it is that you’re doing. So making a very intentional effort to always have extremely, extremely clear goals with respect to anything you’re doing. I think

Andrew 00:02:21 Can you give a concrete example? Because I’ve heard you talk about this elsewhere. And one of the things there’s two, two things I’d like you to go deeper on as it relates to the clear goals. But one was the distinction between, I think this is in a recent newsletter y’all did between sort of high level hard goals and like clear goals because I think people hear clear goals and I can imagine 10 people having 10 different interpretations of what that means. So if you could make that distinction there and then give, if you give a concrete example, when you say clear goal, what does that actually look like versus what somebody’s thinking?

Rian 00:02:49 Yeah, so obviously there’s different kinds of levels of girls and we, um, within the flow research collective started with what Steven calls your massively transformative purpose, which is your, you know, your overall overarching life vision mission that is essentially endless. It’s kind of like a infinite game type thing. Then you’ve got your high hard goals. They may be 10 year goals, five year goals, one year goals. And then it just kind of cascades down to usually the immediate task level of, okay, I want to spend two hours doing X and then within that you need clear goals. And I think most people go wrong with clear goals by not making them clear enough, they need to be hyper kind of freakishly clear down to an insanely detailed level and a good proxy for knowing whether your goals are clear enough is whether you feel a sense of resistance to doing the tasks.

Rian 00:03:38 If you feel resistance, if you feel this kind of desire to procrastinate, or if you feel like you, can’t just kind of effortlessly slip and sink right into what it is that you’re doing, you probably haven’t set enough time getting crystal clear on the goals of the task, the exact first thing you need to do to start the sub components of the task. So let’s take an example like writing rather than saying, you know, I’m going to write for two hours, you say, okay, I’m going to write 700 words. And the first step is going to be writing the six outlines. The second step is going to be researching the material I need to populate. Each of those outlines. The third step is going to be doing an additive, outline one, the fourth step, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s just all locked out. And so all of that, again, high level kind of analytical work is done and separated out. And then you can just drop into the actual execution of what it is. So another way I like to think about it as separating strategy and execution, and that’s super helpful to get all that stuff done on a boom, just mindlessly hands flow, drop into the actual execution of the thing. Right?

Conor 00:04:40 My simple rule of thumb is, um, if at the end of that task, like in a, if I’m asking myself, you know, I’m looking at my to do list, like, did I complete this task? If I’m sitting there wondering if I completed the task, the goal wasn’t clear enough, oftentimes like, you know, if, if the goal is like, okay, I need to do research on this. Right? Like I need to like, do like research on like this subject matter in order to be able to do the next step of this project. Um, for that, like, I always need to time box that I’m always like, okay, I’m going to do one hour research. I’m going to cap it at that. And so that way I’m not sitting here being like, Oh, did I actually complete that goal? Right. Like, so that’s like the general rule of thumb that makes it really, really helpful for me.

Conor 00:05:19 Um, but I think the other thing that’s like really helpful to talk about it. And I don’t think enough people talk about this in the flow community, um, which is like entropy versus flow. So we talked a little bit about, um, like flow is a spectrum from micro flow to macro flow and macro flow are, you know, these, you know, incredibly intense States that oftentimes, you know, like a lot of people describe them resembling some sort of mystical state, right? So like macro flow is qualitatively different from micro flow, but what’s the opposite of flow. Um, in, I think that’s like a really important question to ask. And, and so what chick sent me high talks about in some of the original researches, you know, it’s about entropy versus flow. And so if you think about like a, like, like cognitive entropy, as you know, your mind is like kind of scattered between a number of different things, right?

Conor 00:06:05 Your mind is a goal directed system, right? So it’s looking for goals and maybe you’re scattered between a number of different goals. You don’t know what, like you actually want to spend time on, like, if you think about like your, like how entropic your like mental state is and apologize if I’m being too esoteric, is that like, did you mean sort of like scattered? Exactly, exactly. Cause like you waste so many resources worrying about things that you shouldn’t be worrying about or thinking about things that you shouldn’t be thinking about in flow is to a certain extent, the opposite of that, right? Because in flow, like, you know, flow is a game of attention. That’s when your attention is completely focused on the present. And when your attention is completely focused on the present, you’re not worrying about the past. You’re not worrying about the future. Like you’re, you’re, you’re not wasting all of these cognitive resources, just burning calories on, you know, static and entropy basic. Right. And so it’s though like the, the, the mechanism of clear goals is designed to leverage that goal directed system and get you as focused as possible on one given thing. Um, so that, you know, you’re not burning too many calories on the North.

Rian 00:07:04 Yeah. You want to sort of proactively facilitate the presence or flow by getting that like entropic worth work out of the way in advance, constantly systematically as just part of your process rather than, you know, the first half of your Workday involving doing that, you should have a process in place that gets that stuff done separately consistently. So that again, you can just drop straight in. So how do you to do that? Like, what’s your process for doing that on a regular basis? I, every night I’m pretty extreme with it. I hate to the foot, the point you made earlier, like people underestimate the power of taking simple things to extreme levels. And it’s a good point. I mean, a lot of this stuff, a lot of our training, you know, I think when we talk about flow, we go into the neuroscience of it.

Rian 00:07:50 People assume that the training is going to involve all of these really complex, mysterious, you know, in depth, bizarre hacks and tools and tips. But a lot of it is extremely simple stuff that oftentimes it’s so simple, people underestimate it’s a fact or advocacy. Um, so what I do, I’ve kind of to have a weekly, well, I have a monthly process as well for Paul. I have a weekly process for basically mapping out my entire week in blocks. And I call that like my kind of strategy session. I usually do that on a Sunday morning. And so I’ll map out the week at a high level, all of what I need to do all of my goals and try and block it all straight onto my calendar. And that means I can hit Monday morning without wondering anything really. And obviously there’s movement there. You know, I need to be able to adapt to what’s actually happening during the week, but it gets all of that stuff out of the way in advance of the week so that I can get in and just execute and forget about, you know, where I’m going or what I’m doing or what path I need to take.

Rian 00:08:43 I’m just running down a path for the entire week. Um, and then I do a smaller micro version of that every night I get, I call it like a paradine ritual kind of thing, where basically I’ll finish Workday review. What I’ve done, look at the weekly objectives, mapped them all out. And then in pretty extreme detail calendar the next day. Um, usually by the hour, depending on the task and I’ll set clear goals for each task that evening as well and line up everything that’s needed to begin those tasks again, a huge part of procrastination and a huge part of people’s challenge actually getting into work is that they’ve got all this like clutter they need to deal with before they can start the thing they’re actually supposed to be doing. So you wanna get all that stuff done. I do the evening before I, and you want to get clear on what it is that you’re doing, and then you wake up in the morning, all of that, your previous self has taken care of all of that high level work and you can just drop straight in and execute. And it makes a huge difference. I find for flow. And then also, I mean, outside of flow, it’s very helpful for just, you know, generally working on the right things, kind of picking or defining or identifying the unlocking moves that are going to be more effective for your overall longterm goals. So flow is conducive to just better decision-making anyway, even though you’re, you know, you’re doing that decision making, not necessarily in a flow state the night before or on your Sunday morning session, right?

Conor 00:10:04 Yeah. And, um, yeah, so, so my, um, the, the process that I use closely mimics a Rand, but for me, like it’s a really helpful to differentiate convergent and divergent tasks. And I think like that, that distinction is so important. And so for instance, uh, for divergent task where you’re, you know, creatively trying to think of, you know, what am I going to do? Like, you’re like, you know, creative problem solving for that. Like when people are, you know, you follow these circadian rhythms right day after day, um, and people are systematically better at doing one or the other in the morning or the evening. And so generally speaking people tend to be better at divergent tasks, right? Creative problem solving, strategizing that sort of thing in the afternoon. Um, and they tend to be better at convergent tasks where right where they drill down into a given domain with some, you know, narrowly defined, clear goals in advance in the morning.

Conor 00:10:54 And so like, that’s the strategy that I use, which is, you know, you need some sort of block of uninterrupted time. Like first thing in the morning, those clear goals should always be determined the night before. So similar to what Rihanna saying, you’re not just spinning your wheels, trying to figure out what you should focus on. Cause that’s the worst use of time possible. And so like, like drilling down into that first thing in the morning, and then in the afternoon, taking that for your like strategizing, figuring out what you’re gonna do in the next day, that sort of thing is just so crucial.

Rian 00:11:21 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I mean, yeah. Strategy is, is, um, divergent execution is convergent is another way to think about it. There’s a lot of people who don’t have the language of flow talk about and advise you to do very similar things. Like I think it’s Paul Graham has an amazing article called, um, maker versus manager schedule. And he advises you to do basically a very, very similar thing, which is that in your, in your, during your morning block, you really protect your time. You protect your attention, you do all your proactive long term high work, and then you switch modes into a more divergent mode for your manager schedule for the second half of the day. And you do more of the reactive busy work that, you know, requires less kind of attentional depth and more just, you know, kind of immediate rapid fire.

Rian 00:12:11 Yeah. I think another, another, um, resource for people that I’m pretty sure we’ve either all read or are fans of is Cal Newport’s deep work. Yeah, exactly. Phenomenal. As you’re talking, I’m like, I’m pretty sure we all work at the church account. Exactly. That. So it’s so good that I think actually he doesn’t, he literally, he did not put the word flow in at once. I’ve done it control the workflow is not in there once, which is, which is funny, but it’s an amazing manual for hacking flow for knowledge workers. I think it’s like one of the best go to resources. So definitely people want to get the same when you’re talking about your, your kind of your weekly daily cycle there, I’m like, this sounds really familiar. You’ve taken his stuff and supercharged it with flow.

Conor 00:12:54 Yeah. Just one more thing to add to that. So I’m going to completely miss a tribute and, and, uh, like bastardize this quote. Um, but it was about formulaic writing. Um, and so like I forget who actually, uh, this quote originates from, but the idea was that, um, you know, like somebody was being very critical of formulaic writers and the response was like, well, what’s wrong with a good formula. Right. I thought that was like such a good response. Um, and so when it comes to setting clear goals and it comes to the habit formation, right? Like it seems dry to be doing the same thing day after day after day, but like, what’s wrong with a good formula. Right? And then once you get that formula down correctly, and you just look for all of these subtleties and differences, like in that formula, it’s an incredibly satisfying place to be.

Conor 00:13:42 And from a productivity perspective, from like a goal orientation perspective, right? Like one of the biggest questions is like, am I focusing on the right thing? And like, if you wake up first thing in the morning and like you start doing something and you’re like, Oh shit, wait, am I focusing on the right thing? That is the wrong question to be asking, because then you’re just spending too many of your cognitive resources wondering that. Yeah. And so, I mean, I come from, you know, background in software tech development and like where, you know, agile methodology is King and you see the way that these agile projects are managed and a good manager of an agile project will use pure agile. Right. And so you set up a sprint and advance a sprint can be an arbitrary length of time, but let’s say you have a one week long sprint.

Conor 00:14:21 So you set all of the expectations for that week of time in advance. Um, and then you go and you like execute on that and have a retrospective at the end of it. And so like the good project managers are the ones who like come in and they’re like, okay, we’re going to like, you know, set the expectations. And we’re going to go through this week. Um, in the bad project, managers are the ones who don’t stick to that methodology and halfway through. They’re like, Oh, but by the way, we need to change this expectation over here. And like, th the impact that that has is all of a sudden, you have to do context, switch and context switches are so expensive. And if you don’t set the preconditions right. And commit to those free conditions, and you have to spend time trying to figure out, Oh, am I doing the right thing? Oh, shit. Maybe I should be doing this thing over here. Like, you’re just going to be wasting time. Um, and so like that, like that structure of like, absolutely knowing that when you’re working on a thing you’re working on the right thing, just save so much of that cognitive entropy that we’re talking about a moment ago,

Rian 00:15:15 But one of the things that’s occurring to me as I’m listening to you, it’s like, Oh man, that’s interesting. Maybe someone at one of the upsides when people sort of push back on like, well, why do we have to do this in advance? Like, well, think about how much more fun your week is going to be when you don’t have to context switch. Yeah, exactly. We just drop in and you just get to execute that zone for the week.

Conor 00:15:30 It’s the context, which is so expensive, right? Like, like all the psychology research supports the fact that like, if we have to switch between contexts, like, you know, we drastically reduce like the amount of, you know, effort we’re able to like actually put into the tasks that we want to complete. And like, you know, the, the, the, like, so there’s a lot of back and forth on what multitasking is, right? Like, can we actually multitask, like technically yes, we can write, you know, there there’s something about like what we can pay attention to something without giving it our full attention. However, like a lot of multitasking is actually quickly switching back and forth between like a task in a short period of time. And like, that’s just an expensive, expensive operation.

Rian 00:16:04 Yeah. Cal Newport actually, funnily enough, in deep work talks about attention residue. I can’t remember that Sophie Leroy is the researcher. I can’t remember where she’s at, but she kind of coined the term and it, she refers to context switching, you know, so let’s say you start work on task a and then you go to task B even just five minutes, and then you go back to task a, a certain residue or percentage of your attention is going to be fractured and left hanging on task B that you switched into. So even if they’re both high priority, super productive, important tasks, you want to knock them out sequentially. So you don’t kind of rack up attention residue throughout and then constantly kind of, you know, trickle away your attention as you’re is sort of like the science behind the well-worn and good advice to like a single task, like do one thing, finish it. Then this is why

Conor 00:16:57 Further to your comment about like tech personalities and, you know, strategic thinking versus, you know, convergent thinking. Like, um, one thing that I think a lot about is there was a Harvard business review, um, study that was looking at what are the best core let’s to longterm business success. And like what they found was the best, uh, correlates longterm business success is cognitive flexibility, right? It’s, it’s, it’s like, it’s the ability to deal with, uh, gray areas effectively in like that, like one thing that I think is a true Mark of maturity. And, you know, if you, if you work in tech, you’re used to working with younger personalities, right? Like at least when you’re working in the Bay, because, you know, the average age there is so young, um, and like the, the Mark of kind of that, that, that youth, and like that lack of fully developed maturity is, uh, optimizing for, you know, one metric or two metrics, a narrow number of metrics, right?

Conor 00:17:51 Whether that’s, you know, career success or their financial situation or whatever else. And I see this like across the board time and time again, and like, as you grow in maturity, you’re optimizing for more and more things over time. And so your ability to kind of deal with gray areas and deal with a more complex optimization strategy where they can now, I’m not just optimizing for my career, but I’m optimizing for my career, plus my relationships, plus my physical health plus whatever else. Like, you’ll see that come over time. But that takes a lot of willingness to work with gray areas. And like, I’ve been on, you know, a number of different hiring panels, you know, over the course of my career. Um, just because I really enjoy it. Like, I really enjoy doing interviews of candidates and getting a sense for how they might work in an organization.

Conor 00:18:32 Um, and when you’re on, like in those conversations and you see the way all of these managers think a lot of them are like, really, like, don’t use this language specifically most of the time, but they’re looking for that cognitive flexibility of like, okay, this person is great. You know, they did their PhD in physics, but can they switch contexts from doing like, you know, having had like this incredible success in academia to being an industry or being an industry in this specific domain. And like, that’s a huge thing that you need to be able to cultivate over time.

Rian 00:18:59 Right. Exactly. And it goes back to meta skills on the primary competencies. You know, if you have those, like those base foundational things at play, like the ability to use your cognition effectively, the ability ability to be creative, drive yourself into flow, it’s going to facilitate and enhance your ability to do well. Or, you know, when, even as a matter of scale, across different domains, different areas, different tasks, et cetera.

Andrew Totally. Yeah. So, so I wanna, um, I wanna kinda do make an ultra concrete, right? Cause I, this is one of those things where it can, if not handled, right. I feel I can go, you can go in the fuzzy direction and people won’t really like grab it and run with it. And that’s really what I want for people and for, for all of us as well. So let’s do a quick case study and let’s imagine I want to give you guys a case and we’ll just throw it at you and let you just imagine how you would go. So let’s take the tech example because there’s a lot of people like in that world who listened to this, the show let’s take a product manager, right? So this is someone who has to basically interface between many groups of stakeholders, many people they work with, from engineers to business people, to internal and external to customers. So they are just very, there’s a lot of scattered newness there. Uh, how would you remake that person’s day? So to speak?

Conor 00:20:14 I mean, I can respond for my own personal experience. Cause, cause this is pretty challenging, right? So like first off is like, like notifications are by definition, you know, the opposite of what you should be doing if you’re looking to leverage attention to the present, right. Because it’s just going to pull you out of any state that you’re in. Um, and it takes you a while to get back into flow if you can’t even find flow again, once you’ve been interrupted.

Rian 00:20:37 So is it fair to say, just as a quick, just a precondition kind of thing here, I know you guys have said flow falls focus a bunch of times here. So it seems like the overarching principle is that this is a game of attention and whatever it is you end up doing, whether it’s on the list of published for flow triggers or not like this is all a game of driving your attention fully into the present moment.

Conor 00:20:55 Oh, the triggers do, are they help you drive that attention? And so like, if you’re using risk as a flow trigger, you know, it’s like risk is one of the most potent ones you can use, right. Risky as we discussed earlier. But like it’s one of the most potent ones that you can use. And so like all of these things are just designed to allow you to improve the amount of focus or the amount of attention that you’re spending on the present moment. Um, and so like when it comes to like notifications first off, you know, like obviously all of those notifications should be silent as much as possible. Um, but one thing that I found in my own experience, because I do, um, I’ve managed a number of different data science projects. I do a lot of different consulting, uh, or I’m in a lot of different consulting environments.

Conor 00:21:35 And oftentimes you’re on client sites, you’re interacting with all different stakeholder groups. You’re not able to control your environment in the same way that you can if you’re, you know, we’re, uh, if you’re a programmer who’s working remotely, who is able to, you know, deep dive into things for an extended period of time, um, and the, the heuristics are the rules of thumb that I’ve found to be most effective in those cases is, uh, still to, you know, silence all those notifications for anybody that you’re interacting with. You know, you give them your undivided attention, um, and you have to be very good at boundary setting as well. Um, and so like, like boundary setting when you’re dealing with new clients is like challenging to do. Um, but you just have to get very good at, you know, setting aside time that allows you to actually do the thing that you do.

Conor 00:22:21 Um, but part of it, I think is, you know, if, if you get into that mindset of when I do this thing and it is trying to scatter me because, you know, you walk into an office of, you know, one of your clients and then this person sees you as an expert in this field. And so they try and pull your attention to this way. And then somebody else is trying to pull your attention this way and they’re trying to change the scope of work. And so like, you have to do this thing rather than that thing. Um, like just like making sure that you’re giving things, your undivided attention, um, is challenging to do. But I think like I I’ve been able to find flow in those projects, um, by kind of celebrating the novelty behind it and celebrating the fact that, you know, all of these things are constantly changing.

Conor 00:23:02 It’s a for instance like, like one analogy I really like to use is, um, you know, I’m a longterm meditator. I’ve been meditating for over half a decade at this point. And, uh, when I first started meditating, um, I was living in Chicago. And so I, the, one of the few periods of time that I would have was on the train on my way to work in the morning. And so I would try and meditate in that environment and it’s loud and there’s chaotic and there’s all sorts of stuff going on, but it’s the same underlying problem, right? Like how do you be present in this, in the context of all of these changing variables around you? Um, and one of the quotes that came to mind, uh, when I was in that state, uh, or when I was in that, um, period of my life was, uh, the world is your singing bowl, right?

Conor 00:23:42 And so if you think of like meditation, right, like you a singing bowl, right? Like, you know, at the end of a meditation period at the beginning of meditation period, whatever it might be. Um, and that is a tool, that’s a mechanism that’s designed to kind of indicate that the meditation session is started or it’s ended. And so it’s designed to focus your attention. Um, and so that quote like the world is your singing bowl is a way of saying that, you know, even amongst all of those distractions, you can use that as a focusing agent in order to be able to tune your ability, to still focus, still maintain flow in a chaotic environment. Because a lot of what we’re doing is we’re teaching people to be more anti-fragile right. We’re teaching people how to retain their integrity in really challenging chaotic environments. And so if you’re an executive working in that environment, you have to deal with a tremendous amount of chaos, right. Um, and so maintaining your integrity in the face of that is something that you build over time, but changing, reframing the situation as like these distractions are actually designed as a practice that allows me to refocus my attention, um, rather than a distraction, I think that reframing exercise alone is one way that you can make these, uh, these concepts a lot more concrete, even if you’re not able to control every aspect of your environment in the way that say that programmer who works from home is able to do.

Rian 00:25:05 Yeah, well, at one point I would actually add, funnily enough is literally just that in the same way that certain activities are more rich and flow triggers, some professional situations or setups or roles are actually just literally just more challenging to get into flow in. You know, so it’s as simple as that, but once you know, the triggers, once you know how you can drive yourself into flow, you can actually begin to like select for a certain roles based on how they’re going to help and facilitate you dropping into flow. Like I often used to, for whatever reason, use the example of a property developer with an activity or a, or a job, maybe I’m totally wrong on this because I’ve never done it, but that I imagine would be less, um, conducive to flow in that you’re kind of on the phone for five minutes.

Rian 00:25:48 And then you’re in the car for a little bit going to, you know, visit a site and then you’re talking to another person you’re on a deal. So I just, I think there’s just less room or scope for being able to drop into flow in certain roles. And obviously everything Connor’s pointed to, I think will help and assist no matter what the situation is, but it is also important to be aware of that fact. And then another thing I would add that can make a difference regardless of, of how conducive to flow your specific role or situation is, is the idea of flow proneness and basic flow hygiene. So we’re evolutionarily wired for flow. At least that’s what we hypothesize your, your system wants to drive itself into flow. But a lot of people’s basic habits and ways of living and lifestyles make that extremely difficult to constantly fight in their biology rather than leveraging their body to drive themselves into flow.

Rian 00:26:39 So for example, you know, maybe they just did they sleep terribly and you know, if you’re massively under slept massively over-caffeinated and you can’t even hold focus on something for a few minutes, because you’re just exhausted. You’re less likely to get into flow if you’ve got really severe back pain, because you sit all the time and you don’t use a standing desk and you don’t do any kind of physical mobility work that back pain is going to be knowing at you fracturing your attention and making it less likely that you can drop into flow. You know, if you eat a sugary donut or whatever at 11 o’clock at lunch, then you get a splitting headache an hour and a half later, the chances are that you’re less likely to get in the flow. So you want to be aware of all these like systemic holistic habits and behaviors that I think can heighten your flow proneness in general. So they’re almost like a backdrop to the flow triggers. Um, and the more on point you get with all of those, again, basic like peak performance habits, the more likely you are to get into flow. And the more your system is kind of wired and set up and primed to be able to get in flow. Right.

Conor 00:27:41 Just to add one more thing. So we talked about the challenge, skill balance as being the golden rule of flow. If you’re in a chaotic environment like that, where, you know, you’re dealing with tons of different stakeholders, colleagues, you know, managers, whatever it might be, um, you need to leverage a lot of the strategies from group flow instead, which operates a little bit differently. And so, um, so group flow, so just as individual flow, let challenge go balances, you know, the golden rule rule for group flow, which is, you know, a flow that a, a group of people get into and probably the best example of this as surgeons, right? We’ve surgical teams, they’re all so focused on a shared goal. Um, that those teams just get into flow like nobody else, because they have a shared level of expertise, right. They all know exactly what’s happening.

Conor 00:28:26 They have a shared goal, right. Which is to complete that surgery. Um, they have a common vocabulary. Um, and so like leveraging those sets of triggers is very important. Um, but the, the let’s say the golden rule of group flow is, uh, the so-called yes. And principle. And so this comes straight out of improv. Right. And so like in improv, any conversation you have is always additive. And so like, um, you know, if, if say you’re the set up for your improv game is, you know, uh, you have an old man who’s sitting on a bench and somebody walks up to them and make some sort of comment, right. Like the old man, can’t just sit there and be like, Oh no, I’m impervious to everything. Like, I’m not going to respond to that. Right. Um, like your conversations that you have when you’re trying to maximize for group flow are always additive.

Conor 00:29:15 And so you’re always saying yes, and you’re contributing something to that conversation. And so like, you can see this in a number of different ways. I mean, you can literally say yes, and to somebody it’s crazy how like, infectious that becomes in conversations when you do that, um, you can use language of like, Oh, I agree with you. And I would add, right. Like, like all of that language, like it makes other people feel validated. It makes them feel like you’re understanding what they’re saying. If you’re mimicking their gestures or if you’re a, you know, summarizing what they said back to them, it gives them a sense of like, Oh yeah, you understood what I said, and you’re adding something to it. And so like being able to leverage that of like always kind of saying yes, and then adding something to it just allows you to tap into flow when you’re in more of those dynamic environments.

Rian 00:29:59 I did, it did an improv class actually, funnily enough, last week for the first time. And he was talking about yes. And we were doing these like live a two person improv stories. And I noticed myself constantly not, yes, sanding electronic, cut the deck. And I realized, I was interested to realize that it’s actually like being Irish and the whole kind of banter that is literally the opposite of yes. That, wow. I was like, I noticed my mind being like, hi, can I take the piss out of this dude? I got to cut them down rather than how could I yes. Add them. So it’s actually to notice as well, like there’s obviously these cultural influences for all of this stuff too. So that’s fascinating. That’s so interesting. Yeah. So it seems like to your point, Randy made a minute ago, like there’s kind of the like table stakes sort of flow hygiene, so to speak.

Rian 00:30:48 Right. And it seems like it would sort of fall into like the buckets of like, you know, body, mind and attention, which is sort of mine, but let’s split it on its own bodies, like sleep, exercise, nutrition. Are you in pain? Have you moved today? A mind is, you know, um, we’ve talked a lot about distractions and attention, but one thing I’ve heard, um, heard or seen crop up in the research was around things like more, some of the positive psychology practices around like gratitude and mindfulness and actually having social contact and things like that. Um, do those actually play a role in, in flow as well? Oh, I would love to take this one.

Conor 00:31:24 So, uh, so first off, yes, absolutely. Um, yes. Uh, yes. And

Rian 00:31:32 So I can take those

Conor 00:31:36 Well, listen in separately. Um, and so, uh, gratitude is something that we’re currently actively studying. And so have you think about what gratitude is? Um, you can think about gratitude in two different dimensions. You know, one is gratitude as a personality trait. And so we know certain people, generally speaking are more grateful. Um, and you can also view this as a habit, right? Some people, you know, go home at night and they, you know, have a gratitude journal that they keep. And so, uh, we’re currently doing research with the university of Southern California on this issue. And so the idea is, are people who are more grateful, more prone to flow and part of this, like one of the motivating narratives that we found within this that is fueling this research, um, is first, we know a lot of these things in positive psychology are correlated, right?

Conor 00:32:21 Mindfulness practice and gratitude are obviously to correlate things. Um, but when it comes to one story that we heard, which was, I believe it was an ex game snowboarder who was feeling incredibly overwhelmed before dropping into this massive half-pipe, um, and you know, through and, you know, competing against her, um, uh, her, um, uh, um, uh, competitors. And so she like her story of this was that, you know, she was sitting up here there on this graph, um, uh, half by feeling completely overwhelmed. And then looking out over the crowd and seeing how much support that she was getting from this crowd and just feeling an incredible amount of gratitude for it. Um, and she went on to win this competition. And so the idea being that, you know, gratitude, whether it’s a personality trait that you have, or whether it’s an in situation way that you deal with stress could be one way of reducing the amount of stress that you have and allowing you to tap into flow. And so like, so this is, you know,

Rian 00:33:23 Reducing where you are, where you are on that Y axis

Conor 00:33:26 Challenge skills balance. Exactly. Right? Like if you’re like, so like one reason why, like, if you’re on like the anxiety side of the challenge skill balance, right. If you’re feeling really anxious about something I’m in a, you’re too anxious, you have too much either adrenaline or cortisol or stress hormones in your system. Um, if you have too much of that in your system, it’s going to block your ability to access flow. And so one way of reducing the amount of stress that you have is by increasing your sense of social support, right? So how supported am I from the people around me? And so like, if you imagine this woman, like sitting out there, looking out over this half flight before, like this competition in feeling that sense of gratitude for all of the support that she’s receiving, all of a sudden, all of her psychological safety needs are met because she has this incredible amount of support.

Conor 00:34:11 And so she is able to deal with a more stressful environment because she has that. Um, and so this is our hypothesis, right? Like we, we have yet to like fully validate it. Um, but that’s where we’re kind of going with this. And we know that generally speaking, you know, positive psychology basics means that having a gratitude practice is really, really important for general wellbeing. And so that’s one half of the question. The other half of the question is in terms of mindfulness. And so generally we say that, you know, mindfulness is also, you know, a absolute necessity. And so we, we generally say that either a, um, rigorous, uh, exercise regimen or mindfulness is a necessity, you have to have at least one of the two, ideally you have both of them. And the reason for that is, um, to increase your ability to self regulate. Um, and so it’s a, you know, making your emotions, um, have a little bit less control over you. Um, and so people who have a rigorous exercise routine and people who have a mindfulness routine are able to increase their level of self, um, uh, self-awareness increase their level of emotional regulation, which is allowing them to tune the amount of stress that they have when they’re in a stressful situation and remain, retain their sense of integrity and goal directedness while they’re under that level

Rian 00:35:23 Mindful source of trains focused attention as well. So it’s helpful in directly in that respect, in that mindfulness trains focus. And just one thing I was going to mention a nice book on this whole topic is called the happiness advantage by Shawn Achor is a psychologist at Harvard. He had, I think the most popular class in Harvard for a couple of years on this whole, all of this stuff and on positive psychology. And the premise of that book essentially is just that positive effect or positive emotion or happiness is a competitive advantage. And it heightens and improves various cognitive faculties like divergent thinking and things like that. So doing a gratitude practice, doing things that help you self-regulate and facilitate positive emotion, also improve performance. Yeah.

Rian 00:36:08 So we talked a lot about, um, someone working in a chaotic environment, right? So someone were, let’s just say, the environment is not ideal for, for, it’s not that flow conducive. How would you advise someone who maybe doesn’t have that much control of their schedule, whether that’s someone else’s controlling their strategy and the tasks that they do, or literally like even someone working in a factory where they, you know, they have very regimented, uh, what they have to do at certain times.

Rian 00:36:34 So, one way I like to think about autonomy is that I think we were talking about this at dinner is that you can gain autonomy by, um, being able to do things you want to do. And then you can gain autonomy also through cognitive reframing, by wanting to do things you have to do. So if you can’t change the actual thing, the thing you can change that you do have control over is your own individual desire. And there’s different ways that you can manipulate or influence your own desire to do something, but that is an immediate and pretty instant way to gain more autonomy is to actually decide for yourself. No, actually I do want to do this one way that I think is very helpful to do that is to have some kind of North star or massively transformative purpose or overarching goal or longterm plan.

Rian 00:37:21 And then even if the job you’re doing right now is Schiff and you hate it and you can’t stand any of the tasks that you have to do, you know, that you’ve chosen the North star, you’ve chosen the thing that you’re ultimately working towards. And so then it brings the thing that previously felt like you didn’t have autonomy within, under your own volition and gives you a Tonomy in it through cognitive reframing. So I think that’s a helpful immediate way. And then obviously overall, you want to be working towards getting more actual, you know, like literal autonomy as well.

Rian 00:37:53 I’m riffing on that. You know, we, we were talking about this at dinner. Um, there’s this idea that chick sent me, I had of, I think it was him of like vital engagement right. Of that sort of. So, so I was hoping you could do two things one, and maybe they come together. Like they seem to, in my mind, we’ll see if they, if they actually do one, what does that idea? And two, um, I don’t know if you two have talked about this together before, but I know you have, Ray is if you could talk a little bit about the way you frame passion and purpose and make a distinction between the two, I found it to be quite useful the first time I heard it. So maybe you could explain that.

Rian 00:38:24 Sure. But I love the notion of vital engagement. A chick sent me, I wrote about it in God. I think it’s beyond where my anxiety, I can’t remember which one it is. Um, but he doesn’t talk about it that much elsewhere. Um, but essentially it’s just this effect that seems to happen when you’re having lots of individual flow state experiences, but they’re all under the rubric of some overarching mission or vision or goal that you’ve set for yourself, that North star, that North star. Exactly. So what happens, let’s say you’ve got like, I dunno, like a 30 year ultimate objective and you’re getting into flow on a Monday afternoon. And then again on a Tuesday morning, Wednesday morning, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, outside of the acute or specific flow experiences, the rest of your life, even when you’re not technically in a flow state gets infused with the sense of meaning, because it’s all entangled and wrapped up and packaged against this overarching North star that you’re ultimately aiming at. And I’ve experienced this even like extremely strongly myself. People often refer to it as momentum feeling like they’ve gained, they’re gaining momentum or they’re in like a state of momentum. And all of a sudden, you know, getting your bank account set up for your company that you’re building is like exciting as hell paperwork form.

Rian 00:39:42 Obviously not in flow state where they’re filling out the form, but it’s tied onto the narrative that is immensely meaningful. And that has lots of flow States populated throughout it. That is, um, yeah, that just adds and drives, meaning creates that sense of what he calls vital engagement or what a lot of people call momentum. And then as far as passion and purpose, I think Steven has a cleaner way of defining or distinguishing between them that I forgotten. But essentially passion is you loving the thing or enjoying whatever the thing is, like the activity, the activity. Yeah, exactly. So being passionate about, I don’t know, whatever it is writing and then purpose is that thing, having some kind of impact externally or on others. So then when you take passion and you add it to purpose, it sorta turbocharges the whole process. So you’re not just loving writing, but you’re loving writing. And you’re simultaneously knowing that it’s going to positively impact the lives of others or whatever purpose it may have for you.

Conor 00:40:39 And I think one way to balance this out is so, so there’s a lot of talk of like passion and motivation versus discipline. Um, and so in the high performance space, it seems like people are kind of split down the middle, right? Where like, you know, the people who are like passion motivation tend to be a little bit critical of the discipline people and the people that the discipline people are like, why are you doing passion motivation? Because these things, you know, are not longterm sustainable. And so if you’re like wake up one day and you’re not passionate, then like you’re screwed, where are you going to do it? And so, like, I think what you’re seeing in this space and, um, there’s a lot of interest in the Stoics on the one hand. And so like, you know, Tim Ferriss is really interested in the Stoics.

Conor 00:41:15 Um, Ryan, holiday’s really interested in the Stoics, like, especially in tech, you see a lot of this interest in the Stoics, which is about, you know, discipline and rationality over time. Um, and then on the other side, you see, um, people who are a little bit more interested in flow, people were interested in that this autotelic personality that we’re talking about. Um, and you know, sometimes we refer to this as like the hedonic, uh, way of doing something similar because you know, flow, leverage has all sorts of, you know, intrinsic motivators. Um, and so I think like there’s no right answer, right? Like if you think of like these two different camps, one is looking at, you know, motivation and passion, um, and flow and Auditel personality and the other campus looking for discipline, um, and stoicism and willpower. Exactly. Um, and you know, regimen like doing the same regimented thing day after day.

Conor 00:42:02 I think these are, should be viewed as, you know, two different arrows in your quiver and you should be able to leverage both of them. Um, but like right now it seems like, you know, uh, I feel like people are way too one sided when they approach this and say like, Oh, it’s either this thing. Or it’s like the other thing, right? Like it’s either the discipline or it’s the passion. And like, you know, the discipline people just hate the passion people, right? Like for some reason, like Ryan holiday’s books and like, it’s just like, you know, like really critical of it. Or you read like, you know, Tim Ferriss quoting like Marcus Aurelius. And like, you know, they’re like these really heavy hitting quotes about like the need for like, you know, repetition and like discipline, um, which I think is essentially stupid, right? Like you should be able to navigate both one, like both sides of that territory. Well, in like when you run out of passion, when you run out of motivation, you know, that’s when like the discipline comes in of like, Oh, I’m going to continue to do this thing. I’m going to continue to drive productive value for my time on this planet. Um, and I’m going to expect over time that motivation and passion

Rian 00:42:59 Related to that is the idea of grit, right? Like, like Angela Duckworth has talked so prominently about that in her. I love her book. Right. It’s that idea of passion and perseverance. Right? You need them both, right. It’s a long run. And what actually related to that one question that I was wondering about is, um, I think, uh, speaking about another, another sort of luminary in the, in the space of peak performance and human potential in like someone who’s on the cutting edge of exploring, like, how far can we take this, this, this human thing is, um, Anders, Ericsson, right? So, you know, the godfather of deliberate practice. And, um, one of the things I was wondering about is, is the relationship between deliberate practice and flow. And the reason this, this just came to mind was, um, I th they seem to be related, but not the same thing in the sense that, like, when I think of deliberate practice in a very Orthodox definition of that, of what that is, it’s sort of this hyper aware level of like feedback.

Rian 00:43:52 And I think they share a lot of commonalities, but the level of intensity with which you’re like self analyzing and getting feedback in, in a deliberate practice setting, which is exhausting, um, seems kind of contradictory to the, the arising of flow, whereas, and flow maybe is a different experience. I’m just curious what you’ve seen or your, your thoughts on the relationship between those two things. The way I conceptualize that at least is that, again, the way I kind of view it again, is that like flow is sits underneath all of this stuff. And then you’ve got like deliberate practice, or again, as we were talking about earlier, you know, the specific skill or implementation of whatever it is that you’re doing on top of that, sometimes you’re going to be in flow when you’re that sometimes you’re not going to be in flow when you’re doing it.

Rian 00:44:33 The point Anders, Ericsson is great at making is that you should just show up and do it anyway. And the, you need a hell of a lot of hours probably to get good at the thing. So I think that they are definitely like synergistic and complimentary, and it’s definitely not like one way or the other. Um, the one thing I’m critical of is the whole 10th has Dyer’s notion of is totally and utterly arbitrary. Yeah. Um, yeah, but I know that’s kind of been debunked, but, um, I love actually, I love the notion of deliberate practice and the idea of very intentionally getting better at a thing and figuring out how it is that you can improve systematically and constantly out of thing. And then that kind of intersects or relates to clear goals also. Um, so I think that they are separate, but interrelated and definitely complimentary.

Rian 00:45:21 Yeah, one way I think the way I heard it put, I think actually this might’ve been in Angela Duckworth’s book, grit was that, um, deliberate practice was for preparation and flow is for performance. In the sense of like deliberate practices is very, very intense, deliberate to use the word a thing you do as you’re practicing and preparing. But then, um, flow is, is far more likely to be an experience that arises in a performance context where you’re not actually doing that self analysis. Cause like that’s what our self critical nature is a little bit, it seems to me a little bit antithetical to flow to the rising of flow. And that’s very much what you’re doing. And deliberate practice setting is you’re deliberately looking at that, you know, that critical nature, but then in a performance context, you know, it’s a difference between like, you know, somebody on a football team runs a play and then they’re looking at the film and analyzing it versus like it’s game time. Right. And I think you’ve probably hit it more in the game,

Conor 00:46:14 But even when you’re in like that period of practice, like I would argue that you’re still trying to tap into flow when you’re sure period practice, because like when you tap into flow, your sense of self is starting to dilate. Right? And so your, your sense of, um, self-awareness acts differently, right? Like your sense of ego, it gets pulled out of the equation. Um, and so you don’t want to be rigorously self-critical at the point that you’re doing that. However, you know, you want to be able to, you know, go and do whatever your activity of, you know, choices, right. If it’s downhill skiing, you want to be able to, you know, ski that run without any sense of, you know, self criticism self-awareness drop into that state. And then when you’re on the lift back up, then you’re analyzing what you did and analyzing what you could’ve done better. And so even within that, like, you don’t want to promote this idea that you need to be, I don’t know, like overly logically aware of what you’re doing while you’re doing that. Like you, you want a degree of presence, but you don’t want nuclear a sense of being outside of yourself per se, because then you’re too focused on, you know, how it is that you’re appearing from an outside perspective. And when you do that, you’re losing your ability to actually be, you know, in that moment navigating that situation

Rian 00:47:27 Know actually, as I’m listening to you that a lot of sense, because it seems like, I think I had just combined two different ideas. One was the sort of, uh, rational, analytical, like post-game analysis. Right? That’s what I was going to say, go watch the film, right? That’s what the film sessions for the next or that afternoon or whatever. And then you take the lessons and go back to the field the next day and practice. Um, I think I had combined that idea with the idea of clear goals in a deliberate practice sense of like, you know, I’m thinking of a musician, right? He’s trying to like, let’s imagine a guitar player. Who’s trying to like nail a really hard pattern lick on the, on the fretboard and in a way that is a clear goal, right? You are trying to do this one thing and you’re busting your ass trying to do it.

Rian 00:48:06 And I think what I confused was the type of feedback loop you’re getting into there where you’re okay, I’m not there yet. You’re tweaking. And you’re adjusting, trying to get there with that sort of analytical feedback loop and they do seem different. I think you want to separate them sort of similarly to the strategy and execution thing. Like the post-game analysis analogy is perfect. And most of the sports psychologists that I know would say as well, that you want there to be as little difference as possible between practice and performance. But I think the reason that you’re more likely potentially to get into flow while actually performing is again, actually comes into the triggers risk, for example, is heightened significantly when actually performing. But I don’t think you want to do anything inherently different apart from being more conscious of how you can improve. But again, that usually takes place after the fact of the practice whilst, you know, going throughout the practice phase. Yeah.

Conor 00:48:59 There’s also something about you that knows like when it’s game time, which is really interesting. And I see this like, like in skydiving, like this always happens even with somebody who’s doing their very first skydive, you know, a tandem skydive strapped to an instructor, um, where it’s like, you’re nervous, you’re nervous, you’re nervous. But as soon as you’re out of that plane, it’s like, well, what the fuck are you going to do now? Right. Like you’re not going, you’re not going back up. Right. You can’t flap your wings and go back up. Um, and so like, as soon as you’re actually in that moment, then you have a tendency to drop into it. Um, and so I think that’s one part about performance that, you know, really differentiates it from practice where, you know, practice you’re, you’re allowing yourself to, you know, practice that guitar lick and then like, Oh, you messed up that note until you’re gonna stop and you’re gonna redo it.

Conor 00:49:40 Right. Like you never do that when you’re actually doing that performance. And so there’s something about the commitment that’s associated with that act that allows you to, I think, optimized for actually tapping into flow because you know that, you know, that, that game, John, exactly, exactly. There’s no alternative. Like you hit this point of no return and this happens, you know, every skydive, every base jump, like you hit that point of no return. And then like something magical happens where like, you know, the bat, like the external chatter starts to cease. And then all of a sudden you’re like, Oh, I’m in like the situation you might have, you know, a perilous situation where, you know, you open up your parachute and like, all of your lines are wrapped up and you have to do something about it, but you’re not sitting there, you know, overly worrying about it. You’re solving the situation because you know, you’re past this point in amendment. Yeah.

Rian 00:50:24 Yeah. Yeah. So we’re gonna start to wrap up here a couple, a couple more, um, there’ll be some rapid fire questions, but I want to actually ask one last question. That’s specifically about the work environment for people. And maybe I’m actually sneaking in two questions here. So we’ll do them one at a time. Um, the first one was going back to that challenge skill balance. If you, if you have people who let’s say they’re the role that they’re playing in a particular job or company or whatever, isn’t, uh, doesn’t have that isn’t that stimulating to them, right. Um, maybe it’s, it’s something where they’re doing sort of a little bit more of rote work, things like that. And just, they’re not lit up by the fundamental activity they’re they’re doing. What, what can someone in that type of situation do to make their experience better?

Rian 00:51:04 You know, aside from just leaving, get a different job. Like if it looks bad, for whatever reason they’re in that job, what can they do to make that job better? I mean, you can, you can choose the challenge skills balance, or you can play with it, play with it through manipulating or tweaking, whatever situation you’re in. So for example, I mean, a ultra simple example is you’ve got to bang out a project by one o’clock or by lunchtime, just make it that you’ve got to finish it by 11 o’clock. And then you’ve artificially raised the challenge level by putting a time constraint on getting whatever that thing is done. And there’s all sorts of different ways that you can do that. You know, you can artificially induce heightened challenge by doing tons of different things within the work environment. And you can just try and double your target for yourself. Personally, you could try and again, like complete all your work by lunchtime every day. If it’s Monday and a boring as hell, I think there’s lots of ways you can get creative to make thing harder, like making a thing harder. You gotta dial exactly. If you’re bored, if you’re bored, it’s under stimulating, find fun ways to make it harder and pose challenges for yourself within the situation.

Conor 00:52:12 Yeah. I think one tool that’s really effective is like, imagine the instruction that I think every parent gives to kids, right. With like they’re bored and it’s like, no, like you figure out a way to make this thing interesting. Right. And I think it’s a lesson that, you know, you have to learn at it. Like a lot of kids learn at an early age, a lot of people don’t and you, you have to learn as an adult if you didn’t learn as a kid. Um, which is, you know, if I’m in the situation and it’s not sufficiently challenging, I need to find a way to make it interesting and challenging for myself. And so you do need to reframe that situation. Um, and so I, I remember being inspired by four hour work week many, many years ago. Um, and so I was working a job that I wasn’t hugely, you know, interested in or like it was, you know, a lot of, you know, admin work that, you know, at the moment I thought that it was, you know, beneath me and it was boring.

Conor 00:52:59 And so my goal was to, you know, take the four hour work week pretty literally, and try and complete my work in four hours and then, you know, spend the rest of, you know, the day, um, I still had to be in the office, but I wanted to, you know, study this, you know, like a side project that I was working on. Um, and so that’s exactly what I did. Like it actually worked really well would be like, I literally got my work week down to four hours and then I would spend the rest of the time, uh, doing either freelancing on the side or studying like that, that allowed me to do that. But like being able to reframe your situation and just being able to, I don’t know, like find complexity and interest in like situations that might not be intrinsically as stimulating, I think is, is really important because if you don’t learn that skill, you’re going to be on the hedonic treadmill. Right. You’re always going to be looking for more and more like, you know, interesting environments and like that isn’t necessarily the best mindset. Like, you know, being able to manipulate by reframing is, you know,

Rian 00:53:52 A crucial life lesson. Yeah. Talk to me, let’s pop up from the individual level and actually even above the group level. And I want to talk very briefly about the environment itself. Like what, how, how, how does one create an environment that is more conducive to flow? Like just imagine an office environment. Um, yeah, obviously ultimately it comes down to practices and policies and there’s lots of different specifics. One big thing is encouraging a synchronous communication. I think so that you’re not breaking, people’s focus on whatever it is they’re doing by forcing them to both come in and sit in a meeting at the same time. Um, so that’s a big one. I know a lot of, you know, tech companies do that, uh, emphasis emphasizing and building a culture and focus and deep work is a big one. I think in many respects offices, at least during certain periods of the day should be more like libraries, um, in terms of silence and in terms of just people who are actually focusing on, you know, executing, getting things done, and then related to that, obviously batching communication into certain set periods at base camp and Jason fried Friel fried, fried.

Rian 00:55:02 Yeah. He’s great. All of this stuff he’s amazing on there. They’re phenomenal, phenomenal overall library rules. Yeah, exactly. They’re like a phenomenal case study on flow actually and what we would recommend a company to do. Awesome. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s great. Um, and he does a lot of that stuff yet. Asynchronous communication batching and like sprints, you know, because that minimizes the amount of communication that needs to happen throughout the actual week. You can let people execute, stand ups are good too. You, you know, you knock out the sink at the start of the day and then you get into it for the rest of the day being very conscious and cognizant of timing meetings, setting things up from a high level structurally. So that constant back and forth communication is minimized. And isn’t that much requirement, not having policies around, you know, needing people to have like turnaround times for email or Slack messages and things like that.

Rian 00:55:52 Obviously giving workers as much autonomy as possible, holding them to performance standards rather than to, you know, process standards. So, you know, delegating outcomes rather than delegating tasks, I think is a big one that enhances autonomy and allows people to be creative as far as how to get them done. Um, yeah. So I think there’s all sorts of different ways to deploy it specifically. And once you understand the fundamental triggers and what’s required to be able to get into flow, you can creatively think about how you can deploy this stuff within your own work environment as effectively as possible.

Conor 00:56:26 Exactly. And just add to that, um, obviously no open air work environments, you know, like, you know, obviously there are real estate considerations to this and the reason why, you know, people put a bunch of desks side by side is, you know, more financial reasons than anything else. Um, but that just kills productivity. Right? Exactly, exactly.

Rian 00:56:45 The amount of people who have to go to coffee shops to actually get work done, or like say they can’t come in for a day a week so that they can actually hit the deadlines that they’ve been delegated. You know, like offices, at least in my experience are often a months, the most unproductive places to be. So, you know, you wind your office to be somewhere where people can actually get work done. And I know it sounds incredibly basic, but Mo most aren’t, you know, like I know so many offices where it’s six people sitting around a table facing each other kind of thing and talking every minute or two or, you know, they just check in on something. And like, it’s just so weird when you’re talking about the, uh, you know, minimize all that back and forth communication that would interrupt people from their focus.

Rian 00:57:26 Right. But then I was just looking at scanning my notes really quick and looking at, um, some of the flow triggers and, and I, one of the ones on group flow was constant communication. So how is that different? Well, so you see, when I say batching communication, when you have specific a specific chunk of time dedicated to communication, then you want to try and make that time could use, have to group flow and ideally facilitate a group flow state within a specific brainstorming session. But the situation we’re talking about where it’s back and forth, constant bits of communication, and you’re not going to get individual flow, you’re just getting fractured attention and no real solid group flow or good communication and no real individual flow or actual focus. So you’re kind of like you’re caught between two ends of the spectrum. Yeah. Is there, is there such a thing as like group flow in a normal meeting, or like it’s like the weekly staff meeting, just, just a waste or w what would you, is there ,

Conor 00:58:24 I think there’s a lot of value to that because, you know, everybody’s speaking, uh, uh, like the same language they have similar expertise. And so a lot of people get into group flow when they’re in that sort of meeting. Um, but I think it’s really, you know, helpful to have everybody engaged, not just one person dictating the schedule. Um, and so like, say agile stand up meetings I think are really, really effective because everybody’s bringing, you know, their tasks to the floor, they’re bringing their blockers and, you know, they’re all speaking a common language. So I, I think there is a lot of value to that. And then, um, I guess, like two things to add to what Rihanna saying, like, I just want to echo the autonomy piece. I think the, the, the much of the progress that you get much of the benefits you get is out of giving your employees a high degree of autonomy.

Conor 00:59:06 And if you can’t trust your employees and why did you hire him to begin with right. And so like, like, like micromanagement just absolutely kills flow. Um, and then the other piece is when it comes to immediate feedback. And so like feedback on a weekly clip or a daily clip is ideal, not none of this quarterly or yearly review cycles, by the time you get a yearly review, you have no idea what it refers to. Like, none of that stuff’s actionable refers to like a version of yourself that existed six months ago. Right. Yeah. Remember it. Exactly. And so being able to do this, like, um, like using weekly, um, like cycles, and so for instance, 15 five is a fantastic tool for this. Um, and so, uh, for those of you who are unfamiliar, right? So at the end of you, you fill this out once a week.

Conor 00:59:48 And so it’s supposed to take you about 15 minutes to fill out and your manager about five minutes to go through it, which is hence then in 15 five, but it goes through what the goal is, where that you define the previous week. Um, you give an update on those, you define goals for the next week, and you talk about your challenges and your successes, and you can add arbitrary, you know, high five set their people. And what else on top of that, I find that to be so effective because it keeps everybody goal-driven, it gets, it’s a really good way of upward reporting as well at a very high level. Um, but that level of feedback allows you to deal with blockers and challenges at a much faster clip, because like the goal was to be able to like, you know, speed up business cycles as much as possible, right. You know, the mantra in the Valley is, you know, speed up the time to failure. Um, and so like you want to be able to speed that up as much as possible and getting those immediate feedback cycles, um, in place in a way that’s helpful and relevant and actionable, um, is another fantastic way to improve

Rian 01:00:41 Workplace culture. Right? Exactly. Like having well said, okay, ours are KPIs. Accountability is an interesting one as well because accountability comes with autonomy or at least has to, if it’s being, you know, rationally given at least in any way. So giving people numbers to own, things like that. I know Sam Walton with Walmart, what they do or did, I don’t know if they still do it within their big mega stores is they’d make each department, a sub department and have it have its own set of books and have it have its own targets and then have the store manager for each sub department and like the sport, you know, the sporting goods department or whatever, run that, that department singularly, and be held accountable to hitting numbers for that specific department within the overarching store. So that that person is given much more autonomy over that, you know, sub component to the overall mega store.

Rian 01:01:29 Yeah. I love that. That ties in beautifully with some of the prior episodes of this podcast. Like a one in particular that comes to mind is the conversation with Christina Wiki about creating high performing autonomous mindful teams. And a lot of it echoes like it’s, I’m sort of seeing this, this is very interesting as a conversation, you’d be like, Oh, this is sort of the psychological side of maybe a lot of reasons why that works. And that’s a very interesting one. And just to, you’re saying thing you were saying Connor about a 15 five there actually just as it, as a shout out, they have a great podcast as well. That guy’s called that they started it sometime last year. It was called the best self management podcast. It’s excellent. Nice check for them. Big, big fan of their, of their show. So, um, first of all, I just gotta say, thank you guys.

Rian 01:02:10 This has been such a, such a fun. I’ve been in this conference group flux, how many days it’s been, what, like three hours now it’s been almost three hours before we even get like a, so you just got to be part of our group flow. So first of all, thank you guys so much for your time, for your expertise, for sharing your experience and your wisdom. And, and it’s so exciting. Um, and I’m really huge fan of, of the two of you and what’s your all what you all are up to. Um, so my last question is, um, is there anything, uh, do you have any, for people who are listening to this, is there anything you’d ask of them, any asks you wanna make of the audience and where can they engage more with you? I would say, check us out on, on flow research, collective.com. We’ve got a newsletter there. We send it out every week. It’s always super high value. At least we think with articles and content and ways to learn more, and then you can check it out, check us out on social as well. So flow research collected on Instagram, Facebook, same thing, newsletter. Yeah, exactly. All that sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Conor 01:03:12 It’s like the takeaway I’d like people to leave with is like, yes, they are programmable. Yes, you can, you know, use these tools in order to get more flow in your life. Um, and there are any number of books and resources and we can link those in the show notes. Um, but usually people ask for, you know, what’s the common denominator for, um, resources to check out. Um, and I always recommend, um, a rise of Superman by Steven Kotler in the original book flow by chicks at Mihai, um, that one’s a little bit more academic. And so it depends on, you know, how much you want to work with, you know, a little bit more technical writing. And so rise of Superman is, you know, very compelling narratives about action sport athletes. And then flow was going to the book flow is going to scratch that itch if you’re more of a technical person. Um, but if you have that sort of mindset where you view yourself as you know, someone who can change given the right amount of time and effort, you can manipulate all of these knobs and leavers to get a ton of flow in your life. Don’t be in flow all the time, but

Rian 01:04:06 Health, a lot of it. Yeah, right on. Well guys, thanks so much for the time and keep doing what you’re doing. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness and is considered to be the optimal experience of life. This episode helps you to understand and increase your time in flow, so you can get the most out of every aspect of your life. Flow dramatically increases every measure of performance you can imagine, as well as your subjective quality of life experience.

Our goal in this conversation was to get your hands on the knobs and the dials and the levers of your own psychology. By the end, you’ll have a strong understanding the principles involved so you know how to tweak and improve your experience on an ongoing basis to have more flow in your life, and be able to apply these principles in a wide range of circumstances. And that’s important, because as you’ll hear about in the episode, the science here is very clear — flow dramatically increases every measure of performance you can imagine, as well as your subjective quality of life experience.

This is part one of a two-part conversation. You can find part two here.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Conor’s background and transition into data work
• Rian’s background
• Starting a company in flow
• What is The Flow Research Collective
• What is flow?
• Flow Research Collective goal
• What are the 21st century skills?
• States are activity or task independent
• The ultimate competitive advantage
• The autotelic personality
• Microflow
• How to find flow in new activities
• Why is flow important?
• The skin bag bias
• The astronaut syndrome
• What is a flow trigger?

Enjoy!

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES

Transcript

Transcripts may contain typos. With some episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Andrew 00:02:27 I usually like to kind of start on on more of a personal note, and then we’ll sort of guide it into the, the essentials and we’ll just see where it goes. Um, but one of the questions I had for you, Connor was I saw that you actually have a, a background in international development and economics and that you worked and I’m guessing this is how you got into like the data work you do now. But I’m curious if you could kind of tell us the story, but how did you go from writing grants for like Subsaharan Africa, economic development to being the chief science officer flow research collective, because that is like, those seem worlds apart!

Conor 00:02:56 That happened. So how time do we have, let’s keep it on the brief and then we’ll just see where it goes. So actually I got into data science for a number of different reasons. Um, and so two main things happened at around the same time. And so first, uh, there were, uh, uh, two individuals as to do flow, uh, in Apogee energy. Um, so there are two economists out of, um, MIT. They both wound up winning the Nobel prize for some of their work in behavioral economics. And so basically those individuals were the first people to apply the randomized control trial, right, which we know from pharmaceutical interventions, right? Where you take two different groups of people, you give one of them in intervention, you give one of them, you know, some sort of active placebo. And then you look at the difference between them. Um, their main innovation was they took that strategy and applied it to international development. And so if I go into Subsaharan Africa, if I go into rural Kenya and I give this village to this intervention, this village something else, and I look at the difference between them that way I can start to validate the difference between different interventions.

Conor 00:03:58 Um, and so this was a paradigm shift in nonprofits. I mean, nonprofits are horrific at using data, right? And they’re getting a hell of a lot better. A lot of the reasons why they’re getting better as thanks to bill and Melinda Gates foundation, because they’re pushing randomized control trials harder than anybody else’s. Um, and that’s been incredibly, incredibly impactful. Um, but I started to get more and more involved in this idea of, you know, how is it that you use data to have a bigger impact in what you’re doing? Um, and so I was just really inspired by what was happening there. Um, so I was actually on the other side of the equation from grant writing. So I was working for our foundation. I was working for the rotary foundation at the time where I worked for about three and a half years. Um, and so I was evaluating, uh, different grant proposals, giving feedback for how they can modify that in order to be more impactful.

Conor 00:04:44 And so my goal in that period of time was to use those best practices from these, uh, especially MIT researchers and one researcher in particular coming out of Princeton as well, um, to try and make those grants more impactful. And so I started seeing just how powerful data is, uh, when you’re in those environments. And like there was a huge market gap at that point because nobody in nonprofits was using this particularly well with the exception of bill and Melinda Gates. Um, and so that, that started to change more and more as time went on. But, you know, still, you know, obviously, you know, when I talked to, you know, friends at Facebook who are PhD researchers who are researching, why when you start to write a status update and then you deleted, they’re trying to figure out all the nuances of why that’s the case, right?

Conor 00:05:25 Like that’s how advanced Facebook is. And that’s only scratching the surface of all the different things that they’re doing. And then nonprofits are sitting here doing some more rudimentary techniques. Um, but that just got me incredibly inspired by how data can Inforce human potential. And so like, that’s that, that, you know, set off a whole chain of events. That was one aspect of that journey. The other aspect of that journey, um, is I became really interested in tracking data on myself and seeing how it correlated back to, uh, my mood and energy levels. Um, and so like, this is, you know, relatively quantified self project that, you know, I’ve talked to a ton of people who have done very, very similar things. Um, but I started tracking all of this data on myself and then I was like, Oh shit, like, this is really insightful, but I don’t have any statistics.

Conor 00:06:07 I have no idea how to actually interpret this. I can plot some basic plots, but I don’t know how to actually interpret this in a rigorous way. And so as time went on, I started taking more and more statistics classes started learning more and more advanced machine learning techniques. And then one thing led to another. And then all of a sudden I’m in this room with you guys where I’m, you know, continuing to use data and technology to reinforce people’s best selves, except for, at this point, instead of doing this in the context of sub Saharan Africa, I’m, I’m doing this in the context of, you know, anybody who’s interested in some level of peak performance.

Andrew 00:06:41 I love that. That’s so interesting. Oh man, what’s up. And I’m trying to remember the name of the book, but Rian, when I was getting ready for this conversation, I remember there was this re this book he referenced so many times in some of your other conversations that you said was like, when you talked about as a teenager, right? Like you had that, you had the accident and that took you out like physically for, for years. And you’re trying everything under the sun to like get back to normal basically and get your life back. And you talked about this one book by Michael site. I think it was Matthew side blink. I believe it was. And it was just exactly what did that book do because you’ve referenced it, it clearly had a huge, what was that like? What did it do for you?

Rian 00:07:25 So yeah, when I was 13, I’m not sure if you know this. I think when I was 13, I had a really severe head injury. I went down a hundred foot water slide that was basically vertically pointing at the ground, did a somersault stupidly off the bottom of the slide, Sammy rotator, and then crack the top of my head of the concrete bottom of the pool. It was like Croatia, Croatia, Bri EDU. So the waterpark wasn’t very well regulated or me and my brother were like going up to the top steps. It was like broken planks. We were like, this started off here, put in the air. The is like rotting. Um, anyway. Yeah. So how’d that really, really severe accident for the next year had super bad amnesia. Couldn’t remember the name of my, so my close friends couldn’t remember the name.

Rian 00:08:13 My favorite band was totally debilitated. Mr. You’re a school went back to school that still had really severe symptoms the year after that at age 15, and then found that book randomly in like this apartment I was living in on my own at 15 and Dublin whose book it was still, maybe it was the previous owner or something and just read it. And I wasn’t even a big reader at the time, but he basically does a similar thing to Jeff Colvin and the talent myth, um, and tries to make a case against the idea of inherent talent, of any kind and argues that we are essentially just a product of nurture when it comes to our abilities. And I got like so obsessed with that idea and the way I’ve described it previously is that it sort of like implanted a growth mindset and gave me the sense of agency and Oh my God, talent is not a fixed thing. It’s not static. You can actually develop an extra incentive to you

Conor 00:09:13 Right here. Yeah, exactly.

Rian 00:09:15 Yeah. I remember like at that I looked 15. I would like purposely try and get my friends to argue the talent was a thing. So I could

Conor 00:09:24 That it wasn’t one of those, you got a philosophy degree bullshit.

Rian 00:09:36 Um, but that, but I read that and then became obsessed with the idea that I’m like, God, if you’d like, if you do things, other things can happen as a result of those things. So I started studying properly in school, started reading more. I read another book that was sort of similar to that was the monk who sold his Ferrari, which is a book by Robin Sharma a super simple sort of stuff. But when you’re first introduced to that whole world, it’s like kind of revolutionary to realize that if you get a good morning routine, you feel better for the rest of the day, these kinds of things. Yeah, exactly. Um, so yeah, that was my intro to the whole world of like peak performance. Self-development, you know, personal growth if you want to call it that or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And the rest is the rest is kinda history.

Rian 00:10:17 So one of the things I was really curious about, um, and we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk a lot more about all the things and all these topics. We’re gonna go deep on flow and, um, performance and its potential and exploring a lot of this stuff. Cause it’s, it’s so fascinating and cool. Um, but one of the things I was really in, we’re gonna talk a lot about flow research collective as well, which you guys obviously, you know, come together with Steve and to start over the last about a year or so. Right. Just coming up on a year, 11 months. Yeah. I mean, we worked together for a long time before that, but the company in its current iteration has been around for coming up on a year, coming up in a year. That will, first of all, congratulations. Thank you.

Conor 00:10:50 Thank you your once a year.
Rian 00:10:55 Um, but uh, yeah, I mean, one of the things I’m really curious about just is how has the level of understanding you all have developed around the ideas of flow and like flow applied to everyday life and work. How has that actually impacted your experience of starting this company in the last year? Like what, why, why, in what ways is flow research collective? How would it have been different if you didn’t know all the things, you know? Right. That’s a great question, man. Yeah. It’s a great question. In other words, if we were doing it all, like not in flow, you weren’t experts in flow. Like how would this look different? It’s a great question. I mean, I personally, at least I have my own routine and processes and protocols very much so now sat and refined that drive me into flow. So I can, I feel like pretty consistently systematically drive myself in a flow.

Rian 00:11:44 I start work normally at about 4:45 AM and just pretty much go until usually five straight and I’m able to drop into that state for the entire duration. And it just feels phenomenal, incredibly enjoyable, satisfying. And I go to bed like sometimes so excited to wake up and work again that I can’t sleep. Um, and I assume that that positively contributes to, you know, results in the momentum we’ve been able to gain pretty fast and the movements we’ve been able to make. So I would imagine one thing is we’d be a little further back, um, with respect to where we are wise training wise, client-wise products wise, otherwise. I mean, it’s tough to imagine running the flow research collective, unable to get into flow.

Conor 00:12:35 You’re talking, I’m just thinking of, you know, a conversation that’s, uh, the three of us had you, me and Steven, um, uh, many years ago when we first started, when we first started doing our first research together, which was a creativity study. And so basically it’s looking at the impact of flow on creativity. And so we’re sitting here, you know,

Rian 00:12:53 Great just for the listener, since Steven’s not in this conversation, when we refer to Steven, do you mean Steven Kotler who, and we’ll link to him in the show notes, but one of the preeminent writers and thinkers about flow in the world and co-founders with Riananne and Connor in the right.

Conor 00:13:04 Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So Steven’s our, uh, the CEO of airflow research collective has written many different bestselling books. Um, a lot of them having to do flow, a lot of them having to do with exponential technologies, his most recent book being the future is faster than you think, which launched, I believe officially last week. Um, but so, um, as I was saying, when we were initially doing this creativity study and we’re trying to figure out like, okay, if it is the flow that you experience in creative States, is it distinct from flow that you experienced, if you’re, you know, skiing down a mountain or, you know, inflow in your, when you’re in some sort of business environment or whatever else the case may be. And we’re sitting here trying to figure out the best way to suss this out. And we’re like, actually I don’t think I’ve had any creative moment that wasn’t in flow. Right. And so like when you’re talking about like where we would have been, had we not been able to have, you know, really strong personal habits, a really strong sense of productivity and drive, like, I don’t think we would have been able to do any of this crap and maybe we would have been able to, but like on, you know, give it a three X multiple on how long it would have taken. Right.

Rian 00:14:05 And the other big one actually that you just made me think of is I think there would have been much larger, unnecessary sacrifice. So all of us have been able to live pretty balanced, nice healthy lives while building the company in the last 11 months. And I think unfortunately when people have slightly less robust habits and practices around peak performance, they end up sacrificing everything to get to the end, result their health, you know, their relationships, everything. So because of it, I think we’ve been able to keep other areas of life pretty intact while still making great progress.

Conor 00:14:40 And that balance is huge. I mean, like so much of what you see you and, you know, quote unquote peak performance is like the raw, like push yourself all the time. Yeah. But balancing that with, you know, a strong sense of recovery, a strong sense, you know, the stuff that makes your life valuable. I mean, for Steven it’s skiing, you know, for me, it’s, you know, skydiving, um, you know, without that like sense of balance, right? Like it’s, it’s hard to maintain that in the longterm. Yeah.

Rian 00:15:03 Yeah. That’s something it’s, it’s really, it’s actually really impressive. Cause I mean, as someone who I’ve been a part of starting companies, and I have to say that it’s so distinct from the experience I had, I’m actually like envious and I’m like, okay, that’s the goal for the next one? You have to say in a year in what you, what you were saying right now. Cause that’s amazing. And I think it’s probably probably something that most entrepreneurs probably wouldn’t say a year end. So the fact that I think there’s probably something really valuable you’ve tapped into not just for performance and what the results you’re creating, but also your experience of, of your life and what you guys are creating, which is fantastic. And, and just, I realized just a second ago, we didn’t actually didn’t lay a foundation of what the flow of research collected is. So maybe, maybe you could give just a quick overview. I know it’s a research and training organization, but maybe you just give a quick, um, quick download for the listener of like, what is, what is flourishers collective cool. You take the training, I’ll take the research. Okay, perfect.

Conor 00:15:51 Yeah. That’s how we operate anyways. Yeah.

Rian 00:15:54 That’s how it goes. So yeah, it is both a research and training organization. Connor will touch on the research side. On the training side, we work with entrepreneurs and executive teams, um, teaching them and train them to be able to reduce burnout, stress and overwhelm and access flow state more consistently to improve their output, their performance, the results they’re able to produce in the business. And then in, in their lives, we’ve got a team of peak performance coaches and all of our coaches that are either psychologists or neuroscientists. So the vision there has been to build the world’s most effective experienced, and academically credentialed team of peak performance coaches. Oftentimes the coaches industry is very sort of unregulated. There aren’t necessarily any barriers to entry. There’s no, you know, standards really for what makes a qualified coach. So we wanted to kind of flip that on its head and go to the other extreme and primarily have our coaches be psychologists or neuroscientists depending.

Rian 00:16:55 And so a lot of our training involves usually a client coming on board wanting to get some results that they will generally self-defined a little bit. Um, and we pair them with a coach. Coach works usually over an eight week period to implement habits, you know, changes in their own life changes, mindset wise that are going to help them be able to drive themselves into flow more consistently to get whatever result again they want to get. Well, that’s, you know, reducing the amount of time they have to spend working. Maybe it’s being 10 acts is productive and working even more totally depends on the individual, but we just help them get to that end result.

Conor 00:17:32 Right. And I think one common denominator amongst our coaches is they’re all very interested in positive psychology, right? And so they’re individuals who are, you know, oftentimes train clinical psychiatrist, um, and they focus so much like so much of psychology does on abnormal psychology on the downside of human life. And they’re all people who have kind of come together around this idea of, you know, what, what makes human flourishing possible. Um, and so they’re focused on that is one common denominator under all of them. Um, and I think it provides a lot of rigor to a field that, um, is squishy in a lot of ways. Exactly. Like positive psychology can be that way, but also like the, the trend that we’re seeing right now is towards the life coaches and like, you know, with life coaches, like it’s in a sense it’s watering down a lot of what used to be the domain of clinical psychiatry. Um, and so like it’s, um, I think individuals who benefit from that, I think that’s fantastic, but like at the end of the day, like there are a lot of challenges with that domain of, you know, credentialing, how can you actually have science back approaches that allow you to, you know, um, empower people to unlock their potential in some capacity or another?

Rian 00:18:40 Yeah, well, yeah. And that relates to the biology versus personality thing, which is that, you know, we really demarcate from trying to tell people what works for us or like coaching or training barista based on personal experience and rather based on, okay, here’s what the actual research or literature says about what works. Let’s try this systematically for you run an Antwan experiment, see if it works for you, see if you can produce results of your own life with, and if so, great, continue on rather than, you know, deriving our methodology from personal experience. So rather than being like super prescriptive, you’re, you’re kind of sort of coming to the table and saying like, here’s what science has learned about what flow is and how, how it can be access here’s the menu basically. And then let’s start working with the menu and find what works for you.

Rian 00:19:24 Exactly. Rather than me know, giving you my weird rituals. Interesting. As an example of like this stuff in action, but ultimately you got to figure out how to do it for yourself. I mean, the other side of, yeah, the weird rituals thing is being kind of, um, you know, blinded by science or constrained by science. So one of the, one of the phrases I love to use at least with respect to the coaching is that we want to be consistent with science, but not constrained by scientists. So for example, if there’s no empirical data behind an intervention that is working for an individual and producing great results for them that, you know, they should obviously still continue to do that thing and the science will catch up. And that’s one of the things we say is, you know, normally coaches or clinicians are 50 years ahead of the research because they’re constantly running Antwan experiments with their clients all the time. And they’re gaining this sort of observational data around things that are actually happening. And it’s a very pure, direct, immediate form of in parasitism as well. It still is, you know, a form I think of in Paris is in. And so we tried to ensure that where yet consistent with the science, but you know, not telling people not to do things because there’s no paper yet written about it or whatever the case may be for sure.

Conor 00:20:34 Right. And then in terms of the science, so, um, uh, my background is more the science side of things, right? And so I’m one of, I guess, a tagline to start with the tagline of the organization, right. It’s uh, decode, float, uh, Recode humans. Right. And so one of the main things that we’re trying to do is drill down from a scientific perspective, deeper into what we understand about flow. And so Flo dates back to the seventies when, um, uh, Mihai chick sent me high, the so called, uh, godfather of flow. Um, I started publishing his research on what makes people’s lives meaningful, um, what makes people’s lives, uh, productive. Um, and he, you know, found this state of consciousness known as flow. And so, um, a lot of the research that’s been done in flow has been on the psychology level, right? So it’s been on, you know, what is the subjective experience of flow?

Conor 00:21:21 How can we make difference, uh, psychometric instruments in order to be able to assess flow? Um, what are the different dimensions of flow, right, as a flow, when you’re in a group of people in a social setting, is that different from if you’re, you know, an individual doing some sort of cognitive tasks, um, like those were the domain of questions that were being answered for a long time. Um, and so now we’re starting to move more into the neuroscience of flow. And so what’s actually going on in your brain and your body when that happens. And so how can we map this subjective experience to what’s actually happening within your brain and your body? Um, and that is an incredibly complex, um, uh, subject matter as you would expect. I mean, so much of neuroscience, right? Like, like one interpretation of neuroscience, it’s like the goal was to, you know, solve the brain mind problem.

Conor 00:22:04 Right. And so how can I like match up your subjective experience with what’s actually happening in the structure and function of your brain? So it’s an incredibly complex domain, um, flow intersects with so many different domains. And so for instance, you know, flow is an attentional task, right? When you’re in flow, your attention is completely focused on the present. Um, and so there’s a ton of neuroscience research on attention, right? Uh, flow is similar to meditation, but it’s different from meditation. There’s a ton of neuroscience research on meditation. And so a lot of what we do on the science side of things is we try and drill down into that equation, um, and get a real solid sense of what exactly is going on your brain and your body when you’re in that state. And once we have more of a sense of what’s going on there, we know a lot of things there still a lot of things we don’t know. Um, once we get a better sense of that, then you can use that knowledge to better build training mechanisms, to better build technologies, to better build a pharmacology pharmacological, like inter interventions that allow people to have more flow in their life.

Andrew 00:23:03 Yeah. So actually really quick, I want to like, let’s take two minutes and just lay a foundation. So, you know, everybody knows flow, even if they don’t realize they know it, right. Everyone’s had this experience at some point in their life, even though they may not know it by the label flow. So maybe you could just take a second. And for those who aren’t familiar with that term, just like, what is flow and also, what does it not like? What do people, what are the misconceptions about it? Yes.

Conor 00:23:25 So let’s start with just high level, what is flow. And then we can drill down into how to make that really personal and applicable to many people. Because one thing that I commonly hear is when I’m discussing, um, especially with, um, random people that I meet, right. Because, you know, I live in the Bay area Bay areas and echo chamber, just like any other place like you might live in. So flow is a bit of a more, you know, a common piece of the vernacular. Um, but when I talk to people who are completely outside of like that bubble, um, then like they have like these weird aha moments. They’re like, Oh, I’ve had that experience, right. I never had a language for it, but now I have a language for it. And so that’s really exciting for me. Um, but at a high level of flow is an optimal state of consciousness where you feel your best and you perform your best and the easiest way to get people, to like click and like, know what flow is, is just imagine a time that time passed radically differently.

Conor 00:24:21 Um, and so maybe you got lost in a conversation and all of a sudden you look at the clock and it’s two hours later, um, think of like the like car crash, freeze frame effects, right. That doesn’t exactly flow, but it has that same sense of time distortion. Um, and so those moments, right, the, the original research from chicks MEI, um, indicates that like those moments are among the most meaningful, happiest moments that we have. And so the reason why flow is arguably the centerpiece of positive psychology is because those are the most meaningful, powerful moments of our lives. And so the goal of the company began like became, you know, how is it that you decode these moments and how do you make these more accessible to other people because there’s a science behind it, right? Like we know things about this and because we know things about this, we can manipulate different parts of that process in order to get people to tap into flow. Um, and so, um, uh, yeah. I don’t know if you,

Rian 00:25:15 Yeah. There’s a point there that I love, which is, I kind of talk about it as a necessary paradigm shift. You need to make, to understand what we do as a company in the first place and what our goals are, which is the idea that you can take a state of consciousness, which flow is reverse engineer it, or look at, you know, how it tends to occur and then put things in place to systematically recreate that state of consciousness within your own life. So such you can train and tune your state of consciousness, which I think is quite a radical realization for a lot of people just in general.

Conor 00:25:50 Exactly. And like, yeah, just piggybacking off of that, like, um, so really, really big picture, right? So like the entirety of your life, um, oftentimes the most meaningful happiest moments are when you’re in flow. Um, but if we also, we were talking about future thinking a moment ago, um, like for like, if you’re thinking insanely future oriented with these things, right? Like what are 21st century skills? And this is something that, you know, we talk about with some frequency, right? So like 21st century skills are like your ability to be creative, your ability to innovate, right? Your ability to do things that are you at this point in time, uniquely human. And so, like, that’s the goal that we’re we’re looking to accomplish is by using something like flow, you’re training a state of consciousness rather than individual skills. And like, we are systematically awful at doing this as a species. We don’t know how to train creativity. Right. We know how to take a bunch of art school students. We know how to put them in the same room. We how to put them in different environments that they might be a little bit more creative, but by and large, we don’t have a systematic understanding of these things. And so education of the future will likely be more focused on how do I train you into a given state, much more so than how do I give you this discreet set of

Rian 00:26:58 Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And not a nice way to conceptualize that I think is primary and secondary competencies. So a primary competency might be writing or coding or project management, but then you’ve got the secondary competency which drives or influences the quality of the primary competency. Another way to think about it as like a meta skill. And that might be creativity that might be flow that might be an ability to adapt or learn or synthesize new ideas or think critically. And so in that respect, we’re focusing on a secondary competency that drives and enhances all of the primary competencies or specific skills or things you do in your own life. It’s the flow seems like it’s one of those really interesting things, because not only does everyone know it, it’s that thing that we’re all addicted to without even realizing you addicted to it. I think about it as I was getting ready for this conversation and over the last couple of weeks and thinking about flow and, you know, you start to see it everywhere when you start looking for it.

Rian 00:27:56 And one of the things that stood out to me or struck me was I’d be having conversations with people and they would just, you know, I would ask them, how’s your day going? Or, you know, we, we get into a conversation about something they loved. And it would be really interesting to think about like, why do they love that? Like, so, you know, I was talking to Fran and she just loves yoga. I mean, like loves yoga. And I was just like, I was like, well, what is it about like, what does yoga do for you? Like what you, what is it about that, about it that resonates with you so strongly, she starts describing all these sorts of things. And I realized the middle of a conversation. Yeah. She likes yoga, but she likes the reason she likes yoga is it’s her, it’s her doorway to flow exactly.

Rian 00:28:30 Fall in love with the doorway, but we think we love the doorway, but we really love is what’s on the other side of the door. Another, yeah, I love thinking about that is that like, people do things for the state that they get into when they do those things, but the state is activity or task independent. So the reason a surfer will get up at 4:30 AM and drive four and a half hours to go catch. Some waves is because of the state of flow usually, or whatever the state may be that they can drop into when they’re on those waves. But when you can then take that stage, deploy certain practices and habits and protocols that can drop you into that state at any activity, then you get the same effect and the same draw to that other activity. So for example, if you can learn how to drop into that same state that you’re in, while you’re surfing from a neurophysiological standpoint, while you’re working, then work can begin to have that same like pull and draw and desire and excitement around it. And that’s where you can do when you can reverse engineer flow and then learn how to recreate it.

Conor 00:29:28 And the more flow that you have in your life, it draws out, um, you know, the technical term is an autotelic personality, right? It’s a person who does something for the sake of doing that thing. Right. And so if you like, really like drill down on your friend and be like, okay, but why do you do yoga? Why do you do it? Why do you do it? You know, eventually you’ll get like, you know, I do yoga cause I like doing yoga. Right? Like you get to this point where it’s self referential and it’s like, Oh, that’s the autotelic personality speaking. Right. That’s like that. Like, I don’t know why I do this thing, but I drive, I drive a tremendous amount of value from it. And I can talk about like this in terms of flow and say like, Oh, I want to get as much flow in my life as I can, but why do you want more flow in your life?

Conor 00:30:02 It’s all because I want more flow in my life. Right. And so like when you have a lot of flow in your life and you can send you to go down that path, the reason why you do it is because you like doing it. Right. Um, and so like flow creates this sort of, uh, autotelic personality over time because, you know, um, if I think of my own personal development, you know, I was very logical and rational, you know, for an extended period of time until I started having more and more flow in my life. And then I started doing things more just because I want it to do the things. Right. Exactly. And like, we were talking about entrepreneurship earlier, like, you know, that’s like, you know, the quintessential entrepreneur, like why does the entrepreneur go and create another company? Right. It’s not because they need the money, right?

Conor 00:30:41 Like if you look at the stats, right. Entrepreneurs, like in general, do not make more money, make less money than, you know, a salary person who’s, you know, continuing to like move up in their career. Um, and so like, you don’t do the thing because of the reason why you think you do the thing, you do the thing, because you know, it has a certain level of seduction for you. And if you ha if like, if your mind operates in that way, then odds are, you have this thing called an autotelic personality, which is a fantastic thing to have, especially if you’re an employer, if you’re an employer and you want productive employees, you want people who are audited technically motivated because they’re going to be driven and their doctor’s going to be, you know, punching the clock. So that’s,

Rian 00:31:17 It’s like a core of intrinsic motivation. Right? Exactly. Exactly. And it also related to that, I think is the ultimate competitive advantage. You know, it’s, I think it’s impossible to compete with someone who is pulled into their work like that and has that, you know, and in itself flavor to what they do, if you’re having to, you know, draw on willpower and sheer discipline alone to get things done, there’s just, there’s no way you can compete against someone who’s just like pulled through it. And so like strongly autotelic driven. And I often think of video gamers as analogous to what you can get into with a flow set, like a video gamer exerts effort sometimes for 12 hours straight. And there’s no inherent difference, really. You know, they’re using cognitive faculties, they’re spending time focused on one thing, but they’re able to do that effortlessly.

Rian 00:32:09 But then why, when it comes to sitting down to try and do their email or work is it’s so tough and an hour feels like, you know, endless amounts of time, but they were exerting effort technically in a very similar respect while playing video games. Oftentimes it’s, they’re solving harder challenges, they’re doing more challenging things, but it’s because again, they’re in that state while video gaming, but not able to get into that state while at work. But when you can relay that into other areas, you can just like rocket ship off. For sure. I think a lot of the we’re going to kind of lay

Andrew 00:32:40 A foundation here and then really where I want to spend a lot of the conversation is exploring some of the ways people can do this. Like I want to talk more about like developing that sort of, I think you’ve called it flow proneness, and then how people can start to map this into their lives more. Um, but you know, really making sure we have a good, a good foundation first here. So people will really kind of get what they’re, what they’re working with here. And one of the, one of the things that I found interesting, what you just said, Connor, what I’m curious about was you said that you talked about like the autotelic personality and I’m curious, I could imagine someone listening to this going like, Oh, well I just don’t have that kind of personality. What would you say to that person?

Conor 00:33:14 I mean, um, the easy answer is, you know, as, you know, a human like subject, right? Like you’re like you’re able to change adapt over time. Right. Um, and so like, there’s like the people who have like a strong autotelic personality, you know, are people who kind of fueled that day over day, week, over week, month, over month, year over year. Um, and so like, like the heart of having a growth mindset, right. You know, everybody’s talking about fixed versus growth mindsets right now. I mean, the heart of having a growth mindset is the like expectation that you can change given enough time and effort. Um, and like, like that’s at a high level that makes a lot of sense, but like really drill down into what that means. It’s like, you can change like some of the most like essential parts of the way that you function given enough time or effort.

Conor 00:34:03 That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Right. Like just read the Buddhist. Right. You know, for the Buddhist, like, you know, the hardest thing like the heart of, you know, human suffering is the fact that change is hard. Right. Um, I mean, that’s paraphrasing slightly, but that’s the sense of it. Right. Um, and so like, you know, change is exceptionally difficult and it’s one of the hardest things, if not the hardest things you can ever go through as a human being. Um, however, like you are free as a human being to change these different types of your personality and these different foundational types of your, uh, aspects of your experience given enough time and effort. Um, and so should the autotelic personality be something that you’re shooting for? I’m not sure that’s a really big goal and I think that’s really hard to achieve, but should the goal be like, Hey, I want, you know, a 10% improvement to the amount of flow that I experienced on a weekly or monthly basis.

Conor 00:34:49 I mean, that’s a totally like, you know, doable, actionable goal. And then as time goes on, you’re slowly going to cultivate that personality, whether you like it or not. And it’s crazy seeing like, like, like one thing that really stuck with me is, um, so one of the reasons why I’m in this space is because I read, uh, Stephen’s book rise of Superman, um, many years ago, I forget how many years ago, maybe four or five years ago now. Um, and that book is about flow States in action and adventure sports. And so the, the main thesis of the book is that in no domain, other than an action sports, have you seen evolution as quickly? Um, and so he goes through a number of different action sports, just take big wave surfing. So the amount of time it took us to go from, uh, surfing 10 foot waves to 30 foot waves, it’s just astronomically small in the grand scheme of things compared to any other domain of human activity.

Conor 00:35:37 Right. Um, and so I became very inspired by this and this convinced me that I should start skydiving. Um, and so I went on one skydive, uh, like, uh, loved it, uh, went through a Chicago winter. I was living in Chicago at the time. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And then, you know, as soon as the season started the next year, um, I went and got my license and it became a whole big thing. Um, but when I first got my license, I’ll never forget. Uh, one of my coaches said to me, um, which was, you know, I was incredibly thankful because he had worked with me like extensively. And he was just like really excited about working with me. Um, and I just got a lot out of that relationship. Um, and so at the end, like I was, you know, thanking him for all this.

Conor 00:36:16 And he’s like, no, this has been my pleasure because I just made one more person I can skydive with. And it was, it was the most interesting fucking comment because, you know, this is somebody who, you know, lived far away from where that airport was. And so, you know, he’s, you know, driving out there every weekend, he’s somebody who, um, you know, was, uh, incredibly frugal yet. He was, you know, partaking in, what’s arguably the most expensive sport in hobby you can do outside of motor sports. Right. And so he, he’s putting so much time and effort into this and he’s doing it just out of, you know, the fact that he really likes doing it and like his reward for all of this was like, okay, great. I’ve one more person. I can do this. And like that extent of that, like autotelic personality is something that always stuck with me. And I’ve always just had a tremendous amount of respect for, but it’s not like he was born that way. Right. Like, you know, odds are that this was something that was cultivated, you know, weekend after weekend of like doing the thing that he loved. And then slowly he developed these personality traits that allowed him to, you know, continue to not only do that thing, but also, you know, allow other people to have access to that thing that he loved.

Andrew 00:37:21 Yeah. I love, I love that idea because that I, that I find it. So revolutionary, just that simple concept that like, not only can you change the, that we’ve proven now through, through various domains in neuroscience, that you can change your most fun, some of your most fundamental aspects like your, your intelligence. Right. Which seems for a lot of people, like are really fixed thing. It’s like, no, you can, you can actually, uh, you can actually change that. Um, but then even relating to that is this idea of what you just described, which is that I think one of the big misconceptions, I think re and we were talking about this a week ago or something, but the idea of this misconception in our culture, that passion is this thing you just like uncover, you know, like you’re just gonna open the closet one day. Oh, Holy shit. There’s my, I missed, I misplaced it. It was just isn’t it the whole time. But like, what you just described was it was built, right? Like you started with his spark and you, you, you fan those flames and you engaged with this topic and over time it became like, you love it.

Conor 00:38:14 Exactly, exactly. It’s amazing. Like, I don’t know if I look at like, where I was like take skydiving, right? Like, like my first year of skydiving, I mean, it was incredible. And I absolutely loved like all different dimensions of this. Um, but it only scratched the surface of what I did the season after that, which only scratched the surface of what I did the season after that. And then I got into base jumping and then I got into like these other domains that like were incredibly exciting. And I was, you know, skydiving at places that I just felt were like the coolest places to skydive on earth. And like, and so like, you continue to scale those things like time after time, but like that longterm thinking is absolutely key. And so in, this is one of like the main things that I oftentimes talk to people about when they’re first getting involved in flow is like sometimes, Oh, I had kind of a flow experience where like, you know, I had this interesting conversation with a colleague, um, yeah, they’re weak.

Conor 00:39:01 And you know, my recommendation is always like set your sights insanely high. Right. So they take a huge step back and be like, okay, over the course of my entire life, you know, what were some of the deepest flow experiences? What were some of those most powerful experiences? Like what were the main contributing factors to it? Because oftentimes when people think about flow, they’re thinking they’re really thinking about micro flow. Um, and so I think one common misconception is that, Oh, micro flow is flow, right. And micro flow is one part of flow. Right. So what’s the difference. So I, so think of flow is a spectrum, right? And so if I’m like one common microflow experience is, uh, endurance running. So, so you’ve been jogging for 20 to 30 minutes. That’s normally when you start to feel some sense of flow, right? So you, you start to feel much more in tuned with your body and your surroundings, your mind is wandering less.

Conor 00:39:48 That’s a state called exercise induced, transient hypofrontality. And so your prefrontal cortex, right? Like the front new part of your brain is becoming a less active, um, uh, cause in large part by that exercise. Um, and so like you can like think of that as just like scratching the surface of this much larger domain. And it’s really helpful to get a sense of like, what are especially like the action sport athletes doing or like the surgeons doing are these people who are just performing these incredible feats, because if you look at what some of the things, the action sport athletes are doing, right. They’re not flukes, right? Like they’re able to reproduce these incredible, incredible results that takes so much attention to detail. I mean, think about wingsuit base jumping, right with these guys with square squirrel suits who are jumping off like the Alps in Switzerland.

Conor 00:40:35 Right. Um, so when like they’re actually doing that, they’re moving their ground speed is, you know, it can be a hundred to 200 miles per hour and their feet off the ground. Right. And so like the level of like the depth of flow that they need in order to be able to accomplish that is huge. Um, and so like when you’re initially getting involved in this field and you’re initially saying like, Oh, I want more flow in your life. Like take a huge step back. Maybe not set your sights that high, like jumping shouldn’t be what you, uh, what you set your sights for. But the point is that this is a very, very large spectrum and odds are, if you’re less familiar with this space, you’re going to set your sights really, really low on this. And so, um, try and set your sights as high as possible and then work incrementally through fundamental habit shifts, um, so that you can get,

Rian 00:41:23 Yeah, I think just generally people underestimate the degree to which they can shift or manipulate their state of consciousness without ingesting anything. And that’s kind of what Conner’s talking as well is that you can have radically different experiences to what your everyday default experience is through activities and through doing certain things that drive you into these States versus having to, you know, exogenously consume some substances or whatever it is. Um, yeah, exactly.

Conor 00:41:53 Exactly. Oh, so I was just going to add to that and say, you know, one thing that’s really interesting from what I’ve seen in this space, right. Which is, you know, I’ve been involved in, um, action sports for a number of years at this point, um, is people get so fixated on their individual activity as the way that they get into flow. And then if their individual activity is dangerous and they continue to do that, it’s, it’s going to be problematic to say the least. Right. Um, and so like having the self-awareness to divorce what your specific activity is from what the underlying psychological state is, allows you to find flow in, in new places. And so for instance, you know, we had somebody at, uh, we were just in Seattle for a training event there. Um, and we had somebody who was a skydiver himself, um, and was having a lot of difficulties finding flow in his life because he quit skydiving because he had a pretty major accident.

Conor 00:42:45 Um, and so he was having a lot of trouble being like, okay, I’m locked out of flow because I no longer have this thing. And, you know, I was trying to make this point of, you know, this is just a state of consciousness, right? Like, you know, you can flip that switch doing skydiving, but you could flip that switch and any number of different, um, domains as well in like, if like risk is a potent flow trigger, but it’s obviously a risky one. Right. Um, but like one way that you can trigger risk really, really easily is through any sort of social risks. Um, and I mean, people systematically rate public speaking as the most like scary thing that they can do. And so like fucking use it, right? Like that, that is a risk you can use in order to get yourself into flow.

Conor 00:43:25 And like early on, like that’s what I was doing is like, I like, like I mentioned, this quantified self project that I did before, where I was tracking all this behavior. Like one thing that I learned from that, that I didn’t know before is that I really liked public speaking. I thought I didn’t like public speaking because I would get stressed as hell before I would actually have to speak in public. But then I would look back on my mood over time and be like, actually I would have an elevated mood for, you know, a day and a half afterwards. Um, and I actually really liked it before I like looked at the data. I was overemphasizing like the stress associated with it. And so I started like seeking out more and more public speaking engagements, um, because I just really, really like, you know, like enjoyed like that level of pressure.

Conor 00:44:03 And like, I don’t know when you like make a joke in front of an audience and it hits really well. And I like all, like all of those things are just, you know, immensely, like, um, I don’t know, powerful for me. And so like understanding that like flow is a state of consciousness that, you know, you can change based upon environmental conditions based on, based upon your outlook, based on like your habits, based upon all these other things, you can manipulate these things in order to tap into more flow. You’re not married to doing the thrill seeking dangerous thing eventually is going to get you killed if you keep on doing it.

Andrew 00:44:33 Yeah. I think it’s just a matter of learning what the knobs and levers are and then learning how to play with them. And again, yeah, it’s not inherent or embedded into any activity. Although certain activities like public speaking, like skydiving, like surfing are inherently more rich in flow triggers. So they have maybe knobs and leavers that are kind of easier to play with. But ultimately is, it is just a matter of getting a set of variables in place and shuffling them so that, you know, you can drive yourself into that state. I think I love that idea because I think it’s actually a super empowering idea. Like thinking about that guy, you’re talking about the skydiver who he, he doesn’t, you’re not going to do that anymore. Right. That’s on some level that’s crushing, right? It’s like when you meet, um, like a surfer who loves surfing so much and they got injured and they can’t serve for six months and they’re like depressed, right.

Andrew 00:45:19 And you’re like, that sucks. I don’t want to see a human being depressed. And so I think this is super empowering for people. If they can start to understand, as you just said, Ryan, like the knobs and the leavers, what can I, you know, how do I get my hands on this thing so I can make my whole life better. Right. Cause if the flow from what you all are telling me and what the research shows is not only an optimal state of consciousness, it’s like somebody asked me that I’d be like, cool flow. Yeah. I know the name, but like, why do I care? You care? I can think of at least a couple of reasons, like reason, one, you’re going to feel the best. You feel reason two you’re going to perform at, you know, take any performance metric or measure you want.

Andrew 00:45:53 It’s going to go through the roof. And number three is it’s, you know, it seems like these are pretty reliably, the most meaningful, rewarding, inherently rewarding experiences of your life. It’s like you fill your life up with that. You’re going to have a pretty good life. Right? Exactly, exactly. Period. Your life is going to just get better, full stop. So it’s like, all right. I think it’s really exciting for people to start to that’s what I hope we can get in this conversation is to hand people, some of these, these, these, this understanding and the things they can do in their lives to have more of that.

Conor 00:46:20 Right? Yeah. It was funny like, um, Steven called me a number of months ago and it was like the most interesting conversation. Cause we were talking about our, our newest training program and um, like Steven’s question was, um, what is it that, you know, now that you wish you had known, you know, years ago when you kind of started, you know, incorporating more flow in your life? Um, and so like, pardon me for being totally esoteric, but like the, the, like the response I gave was, you know, like what I wish I had known at a much earlier age was that a, you’re a programmable person in being, you’re the person who gets to do the programming. Right. That’s the weirdest fucking thing about being human, right. It’s like, you’re your programmable, right? Like you can change over time, reprogrammable in reprogrammable. Exactly. Um, and you’re the person who gets to like, decide the fate of that.

Conor 00:47:06 Um, and so if, if you like, like, it’s kind of like a really esoteric way of like saying it, but like, if you kind of keep that back, if mine, then, you know, it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing skydiving or anything else, you know, you can find your way back into that state. And like th the conversation back in Seattle with that guy, it was really interesting because like, there was a palpable sense of anxiety from like, what the fuck do I do? Right. And it’s like, well, you divorce your psychology from like that particular activity. And that’s not easy to do, especially like, you know, if you’re doing skydiving, right. Like you’re just getting this fucking blast of like neurochemistry, right. And it’s, it’s a highly, highly addictive neurochemistry. Um, but you can duplicate this in any other different domains. And so there’ve been times that like, you know, I like, um, you know, my focus is on data. Right. Um, and so I do a lot of coding and statistics. And like, there were times in those projects that I couldn’t sit deeper flow States than I get with skydiving. Um, and so like, I’m sitting behind a computer. Right. But like, that’s like, I’m still able to access that same state. And so like divorce your psychology from your activity.

Rian 00:48:05 Yeah. I have a friend just as an example of that, who used to be college level football player. And obviously he was able to get into flow, you know, massively, while playing football. It was his primary source of it. And then for about five or six years after that, he got an injury. He couldn’t play any more and felt, you know, quote unquote, locked out of flow and had this gaping void in his life. Then I went to a breathwork class, dropped into that same state. It was like, Oh my God, I remember this feels like I’m doing breath work and then became a breath work teacher. And that’s his whole main thing now, because simply he’s able to recreate the same state, you know, through a totally different means. You know, one is like an active form of meditation, which is breath work. One is playing college football, but the, you know, the Andrews all these doorways into the same, we’re always looking for that same place where to get to that same inner inner space, that inner experience to what you were just saying, kind of about like, it’s, it’s probably the most addictive thing ever.

Rian 00:48:55 I mean, I remember listening to, I was doing some research and I listened to a talks to you. Steven gave it at Google, I think. And he was talking about like the it’s this crazy chemical cocktail in the brain that like, if you tried to make a street drug cocktail, it was like the big five where like dopamine, which is basically what cocaine does serotonin, which is MBMA LSD and Annamite, which is from THD PK, weed, nor epinephrin, which is speed. And then, um, endorphins, which is like hardcore, synthesize that in fucking kill. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. We get it like automatically. It’s like, wow, that’s amazing. I think a way that I found at least extremely helpful for thinking about this, that Steven and Jamie talked about in stealing fire, they call it the skin bag bias. So most people assume that you can only manipulate your neurochemistry through absorbing something exotic, honestly.

Rian 00:49:52 And they’ll realize that, you know, endogenously through deploying flow triggers or getting into these activities or whatever it is that you can drive yourself into a state that neurophysiologically is very similar to the state. You would be in if you had, you know, ingested something. And so the skin bag bias is just assuming that, you know, there’s a like distinct, inherent difference between consuming substance, the tweaks neurochemistry versus doing a thing. The tweaks are neurochemistry, but on the inside the Saturday, you know, it’s all the same essentially. And the experience can often be very similar as well. For sure. For sure. I think that’s fascinating to me. It’s like, when you, when you think about, I mean, I haven’t, I’m not an expert in like addiction or any of the science around that, but I anecdotally heard from a lot of different people. If you look at it, a lot of times it’s, it’s people are, um, feeling disconnection and seeking certain States because it’s, if they feel alive, right. And it’s like, wow, if you didn’t have to go to a substance to feel that like, that’d be good. Yeah. That would be really good.

Conor 00:50:49 Yeah. No, I mean the one thing I think a lot about is astronaut syndrome. Um, what’s that? And so, so astronaut syndrome is, um, something that’s happened, uh, something that happens with astronauts who go and, you know, effectively, they’re, they’re building their entire careers, then go to space. Right. And so they like work on that. The entirety of their career, their entire being is focused on that. And then, you know, they get to space, they come down, they shake hands with the president and then like, they go back home and they’re like, now, what the fuck do I do?

Conor 00:51:20 And so like, like, like the rate of opiate addiction amongst, uh, astronauts who have returned from space, it’s just off the charts and you see this with like, especially impact sport athletes, like, right. Like if you see this with NFL players as well, where it’s like, Oh, I did the sport now, I’m no longer doing this sport. What do I do? Um, and so it it’s such like an important thing to be able to like, uh, first, like, recognize that that’s a thing, right? Anytime you get involved in any sort of peak States, you’re like, okay, great. I found like this peak state and it’s wonderful. I got this through skydiving, I got this or whatever. Um, and then now that I have to deal with my like, you know, default, okay. Life, like I’m bored, I feel locked out of something. Um, and then like people get into trouble, right?

Conor 00:51:59 People get into substance abuse, people get into cults because of this, because maybe a cult is the only way that they can get back into that state because effectively what exactly, because effectively what culture doing are, they’re manipulating a lot of this chemistry in order to give you a sense of, you know, um, peak States or flow or community or whatever it might be. Um, and so they get into all sorts of problems. And so part of it is just like a self awareness. Like you need to know that, you know, your psychology is independent from these different things. And then not only will you be happier longterm, but you can avoid some of these pitfalls, which, you know, includes substance abuse and call it and whatever.

Rian 00:52:32 Yeah. Sebastian younger in his book, tribes talks about the same thing happening to a very, very severe degree with soldiers where they come back from war. And they’re just, again of this gaping gaping void in their lives because they were in such a deep, immense state of flow that also had belonging and things like that, all intermingled in it while it wore on, they literally would rather be, you know, you know, horrific war zone with the risk of death, because they’re able to be in that experience, then be at home and kind of locked out of that experience. So again, related to what you’re saying, it’s extremely important. I think for people to have multiple access points in their life that are risk-free. So for example, you know, you need a, you need a cognitive route into flow. Oftentimes it’s good to also have a creative route into flow.

Rian 00:53:19 You want an embodied route into flow like skydiving, but, you know, Steven even was talking about the fact that he was the phone with me. Hi Sammy, hi, who’s the godfather of flow and kind of coined the term into the original psychological research who, and he recommended to Steven that he’d take a piano because in his older years, you know, in Stevens, in his late seventies, early eighties, and maybe he will be skiing, but I don’t know, it’s not definite. So he needed another gateway into that same state. So he’s students taken off the piano, just drive yourself into that state up to, you know, is very, very late, much, much later years from, Oh, it’s important to have.

Conor 00:53:53 And just add to what you said, a social way of getting into flow. And so I think that’s something we normally like discount is oftentimes our like model for somebody in flow is, you know, an individual who’s hucking it in some capacity. Um, and that’s not necessarily the case. Uh, so a lot of people that we find within the people who, you know, are within our larger group, um, are very, um, attuned to social flow. Um, whether that’s, you know, like managers who are in meetings or whether that’s just individuals who are, you know, a little bit more on the social butterfly side of, yeah.

Rian 00:54:25 Yeah. So let’s, let’s, we’ve used this word a lot flow trigger, and I want to actually take a second and talk about those. What is so, so for those, or what is a flow trigger, and let’s talk about some of the, some of the common ones, so they can start to understand kind of what’s on the menu. Yeah. So, so,

Conor 00:54:40 Oh, start with like the 80 20 rule. Um, and so like what gives you the biggest bang for your buck? This is a concept that like people normally get right, as a way, as soon as you talk about it. Um, but they don’t necessarily associate it back with flow, which is the challenge skill balance, right? And so that’s like the so called golden rule flow. And so if you imagine, um, uh, your level of challenge that you have at any given time and the level of skill you have at any given time, if you have too much challenge and not enough skill, you’re going to be overwhelmed, right. You’re going to be in this anxious state, if you have not enough challenge and too much scale, you’re going to be bored, right. Because you’re better than that. Um, and so flow happens at the midpoint between those two things.

Conor 00:55:23 And so there’s the so called 4% rule. Um, the 4% rule was kind of hand wavy. Um, but think about it, like the amount of challenge that you have should be just above your current skill level. So some people put this at about 4%, how do you really quantify it? That’s a nebulous, nebulous thing, but it’s directionally accurate. And so generally you want a little bit more challenge than the amount of skill that you have at any given time. And not only that, but as you get more and more skilled over time, the amount of challenge and the amount of flow that you need, or the amount of challenge that you have goes up, obviously, but the amount of flow that you give goes up, goes up as well. And so you can imagine if you have the perfect challenge skill balance, and you’re playing Tetris and you don’t give a fuck about Tetris, right? Like you’re, you’re gonna, like you, you’re not necessarily going to be able to find flow with that, but as you are in a, um, a domain that you’re much more proficient at, you’re going to continue to find more and more flow as your skill level improves over time. Right?

Rian 00:56:18 Yeah. And just to kind of paint a broader picture as well. So flow are preconditions basically for people who are listening that drive you into a flow state and there’s different categories of flow triggers is what 21 identified in literature at the moment. Is it 21, 22? Depends on how you want it to be the overlap between them.

Conor 00:56:37 The original research is there’s nine main characteristics of flow. Three of those are considered preconditions. And then there are a number of other things that you can, uh, right.

Rian 00:56:46 That’s a really good, just to clarify something, when you say a precondition, is that like, it is mechanistic. Like if this occurs flow will happen or is this more like I’m setting the stage and I’m increasing the odds of getting into flow, but it’s not guaranteed. So yeah. So it’s, it’s a good question. I think some of them are cyclical and then some of them are preconditioned. So in other words, something like passion, passion can be a trigger for flow, but that flow also enhances and drives passion, you know? So it like feeds itself, but there are different categories of triggers. So psychological triggers, there’s environmental triggers, there’s social triggers.

Conor 00:57:22 Yeah. Let’s just make it insane and concrete. So like first to respond to your question directly, I’m like, none of this is mechanistic, right. And so all of this is probably a stick. Okay. And so like, I can’t like necessarily drive you into flow by doing this, this and that

Rian 00:57:35 Button for flow. There’s no like formula, you do this guaranteed. You’ll be in flow. It’s just increasing the odds.

Conor 00:57:41 Exactly. Like this is always a probability game. Um, and so like, what you’re doing is you’re manipulating these different dimensions to increase the probability that you’re going to get into trouble. Uh, but we can’t determine that you’re into flow. Um, you’re going to get into flow. And so just to be really like, you know, insanely practical with some of the triggers. So challenge, skill balance is one of them that I mentioned immediate feedback is a big one as well. Um, and so with immediate feedback, we talked a little bit about my background in nonprofits before. One of the reasons why that was so challenging for me is, uh, because I had a one year, uh, clip on my feedback mechanism. So I would basically make a decision about a grant that was taking place in some country in sub Saharan Africa. And then one year later I’d get a report back.

Conor 00:58:25 And when I got the report back, maybe I would remember that grant possibly, but I would never remember my decision making process. Maybe I’d go back and take a look at it. But that feedback loop was so long that it was not a very flow prone job at all. Whereas like I got big into technology and, you know, a big part of working with data is, you know, actually coding and coding is, you know, one of the best forms of immediate feedback, right? Like video games is great for it. Um, like, ah, but coding is excellent. Excellent for it because I can write a line of code. I can run it, I can see the output. I can see like how I did. Um, and so like, uh, having, like building in those immediate feedback mechanisms are huge. Um, and so anything that you can do in order to have a faster way of getting feedback on what you’re doing, um, is huge, right? And that’s, you know, for me at the time it was like email communication was the main way that I was communicating with people. I had to just drop that off and call people. Right. And like, I was like switching to like phone calls rather than email was way that I could just speed up the feedback loop so much so that it increased that probability of me dropping into flow.

Susan Basterfield is a member and foundation director of Enspiral, a network of people and organizations at the forefront of the global self-organizing movement. Ventures within Enspiral are building companies in a very different way than any other network I’ve come across yet: as they build tools, products, and ventures, the global Enspiral ecosystem is reinventing how work gets done and continually open-sourcing the practices they invent as an expression of the underlying cultural DNA which is decentralization, openness, transparency, trust, autonomy, and love—all without traditional hierarchies.

This conversation is definitely one that expanded my conceptual horizons. Many people will find these ideas to be radically different than anything they’ve come across before. Once you grok them, I think you’ll find these ideas very exciting because it’ll suddenly hit you that, holy crap, this can actually work, I can see a path to making it work, and even though it might be hard it’s almost certainly worth it.

For the first half or so of this conversation, Susan and I attempt to establish a conceptual foundation and nail down what often feels like a moving target, and then we shift gears and focus on how you can start applying this. Some of the things we cover:

• how an organization can work without bosses through the practices of self management
• what consensus actually means — hint, it’s not what you probably think it is!
• and, how with a transparent and participatory governance system, how you can take everyone’s opinion into account and actually still make decisions and get things done
• the evolution of the Enspiral network and the principles that underlie all the practices involved
• how to approach product development in an organic, bottom-up
• some of the common criticisms to self-management and decentralized system of governance
• why the breakthrough of self-management and participatory governance are ideas whose time has come

Susan purpose is to end suffering in the workplace. She is a member and foundation director of Enspiral, a global network of people and organizations at the forefront of the self-organizing movement.

Enjoy!

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Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, and is recognized as one of the top 10 thinkers on business and management in the world, specializing in the areas of psychological safety, teams, and organizational learning.

Before entering academia, Amy worked as the Chief Engineer for visionary architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller, and then became fascinated by the interaction of people and systems thinking, leading to her work on organizational change and eventually earning her PhD from Harvard.

A globally sought after thinker and speaker, Amy is the author of six books including her 2019 award-winning work, “The Fearless Organization,” which we go deep on in this conversation and which I highly recommend you get a copy of if you are interested in this conversation.

In this conversation, we talk about…

• the anxiety that people perceive in the workplace and school, and how to relax around it
• what it was like to work with Buckminster Fuller and why, in his words, we don’t belong to ourselves, we belong to the world
• clarify several key misconceptions about psychological safety and missteps putting it into action
• the wrong ways to build psychological safety — hint, a “psychological safety initiative” is not it
• how to apply different leadership practices depending on the context

Also, I tried something new in this episode and included several questions from listeners, so if you send in questions and comments about what you’re curious about to connect [at] enliven dot fm and I can work them into episodes and also get back to you with what I’m learning!

Without any further delay, please enjoy this conversation with Amy Edmondson.

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Paula Daniels is an award-winning social entrepreneur and Ashoka Fellow with a deep history in food and water policy. She’s the founder of the Center for Good Food Purchasing, a nationwide program that uses the power of procurement at large public institutions to create a transparent and equitable food system that prioritizes the health and well-being of people, animals, and the environment. They are currently partnered with 18 cities and 40 large public institutions, impacting more than 2.2 million meals a day and something on the order of a billion dollars of institutional food spending each year.

Before her work on the Center for Good Food Purchasing, Paula’s worked as an attorney and then senior official in the city and state governments in Los Angeles and California. She was a senior advisor to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and a commissioner on the LA Department of Public Works, California Water Commission, and the California Coastal Commission. Among a litany of recognition for the leadership in food and water policy, in 2018 she was chosen as a global Ashoka Fellow, which is an extremely prestigious award for social entrepreneurs.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• the origin of the Good Food Purchasing program and the story of how it came to be over an 8 year period
• thinking about problems & systems holistically
• how to design solutions to problems you see
• collaborate with people very diff to get important things done
• how businesspeople should think about approaching government
• always being on edge of own becoming

Please enjoy!

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