Get Your Brain to FOCUS, Maximize Your Deep Work and Get Into a FLOW State | Impact Theory

Deep work itself is a skill that has to be trained. But by doing that and really being conscious to maximize the pleasure of each part of the breath cycle, I'm there with my breath, I'm there with the pleasure of just breathing. We have no gene for science. Science is an acquired taste. Yeah, you got to sit down and have blood problem. You got to sit down and sweat blood sometimes. And it really is much more like playing the guitar that if you haven't been practicing, you shouldn't expect that's going to sound very good. How can people get into flow? Assuming that they like carve out their their not doing quick checks, residue isn't the problem. How can they get themselves into a state of flow? Yeah, well, I mean, in general, we're really bad at figuring out how to get a good return on human brains. And one of the reasons why we're so bad is that we've adopted this workflow. When we had low friction communication, electronic communication tools come along, we adopted this workflow of let's just have constant unstructured conversation. Like let's just do what we would do when it's the three of us in the savanna hunting the mastodon and we're just you know, talking as needed on the map. Hey, go there, go there. What do you see over there? We've tried to scale this into our companies. The problem is that requires that the service this ongoing unstructured conversation, you have to be constantly checking in on these communication channels and everyone is feeling the same fingers on the blackboard uh that you're feeling because it you can't do anything else with your brain if you have to service these conversations. So so so to go to your your follow-up question, so let's say you've you've somehow been able to find some space from this. Like how do you actually then make the most of these deep work sessions? Well, something I noticed is that a lot of people who are good at this have rituals. Mhm. So they always have a ritual about how they get started. Well, like for Darwin for example. Like D. Darwin? D. Darwin, Charles Darwin. He built this path through his estate, Down House, outside of London, right? And he called it a sand walk because it was paved with sand and and he had it go past the most scenic parts of his property. And the way that he would get ready to do his work on The Origin of Species every day is that he did a certain number of laps of this. And in fact, so he would start doing the laps and this would start easing his brain into like, "Okay, let me get it in the thinking mode. Let me clear out the other Let me clear out the residue. Let me start loading up into my RAM like what it was I was thinking about." And he had a set number of laps he wanted to do. And so he would lay out that many rocks on the path so that he wouldn't have to waste mental resources keeping track of the count. And every time he would pass by the rocks, he'd kick another one off. And so when he kicked the last rock off, he would then detour into the study. And now I'm doing my whatever, doing my writing, doing my reading, or whatever. That's actually really common. A lot of deep workers have some sort of ritual like that, something they do. Do you have one? Uh yeah, I mean it depends on what type of deep work I'm doing, like what location I'm I'm using. But like in my in my house for example, I have a study where I do my work and it's different than where I keep my computer. Um and so I had a a library table made uh because I've spent a lot of time in university. So I have an old-fashioned library table with library lights and my my books in the mahogany bookcase next to it. And so when I work in there, there's a whole ritual of clearing everything off and getting the lights right. Making it seem like it seemed back in the day when you were in the the room in the library as an undergraduate studying or something like that. To me, that puts me in the mindset. Let's start doing deep work. And so this type of rituals are important. So setting aside IQ for a second, if you had to identify what in your life has been the personality trait that has helped you the most, what trait would you put your finger on? Gee, that's tough. Well, Aristotle once said that all of man's problems stem from the fact that he cannot sit in a chair still for hours. In other words, we get distracted. How many of us can sit in a chair and single-mindedly work out one problem? No, after a few minutes we begin to get fidgety, we want to turn on the TV set and listen to music or whatever. But uh yeah, Aristotle said all of men's problems can be can stem from the fact that we get distracted. So, I think one of the things I teach my kids is when I teach physics to students, I teach them that you have to have butt power. You have to have the ability to sit down, this is what I tell the kids. Sit down, work on a physics problem till blood comes out of your forehead. You see, we have no gene for physics. There's no gene for science. We have a gene for gossip, we have a gene for superstition, we have a gene for jumping to conclusions and making fools of ourselves. We have no gene for science. Science is an acquired taste. There's no gene for it. Therefore, when I teach kids to how to become a scientist, yeah, you got to sit down and have butt power. You got to sit down and in a quiet room with a book and sweat blood sometimes. And was that something that came easily to you or It's an acquired taste. And that was all driven, you just had so much interest and passion to do it. You have to sit down, grit your teeth and do it. I realized that every time I was struggling with all these equations, there was that pot of gold out there. I wanted to understand Einstein. I wanted to understand the quantum theory. I wanted to be at the cutting edge of science, even if it meant that I had to, you know, not go play outside, I had to sit in my chair and simply crank out the math. How do people get good at deep work itself? Yeah. And your early books were a lot about like how to be effective at studying and you were saying that you thought it was just so bizarre that people don't try to optimize their ability to study. Yeah. So, one, how do we optimize our ability to do that? And then, how do we begin to carve out that space to really be successful at going deep? Yeah, so so deep work, which is just my term for concentrating very intensely, right? Where you you give something intense focus without distraction. So, you don't glance at things. No phone, no browser tabs. You're you're you're just focused in. This skill is essentially the answer to the question that my readers had about So Good They Can't Ignore You, which was, "Okay, how do I become so good I can't be ignored?" And in a lot of fields, this ability to concentrate very intensely, first of all, that's necessary for deliberate practice. Deliberate practice requires you to be in a state of deep work. Uh and deep work is also just what allows you to produce very effectively. If you want to use your skills to produce high-quality work, you want to produce it uh at a high quantity per time spent, very concentrated effort uh is what's important. But but what I discovered working on that book is that it's a skill that has to be trained. So, it's a little bit circular. You know, if you're good at deep work, you can pick up skills very quickly, but deep work itself is a skill that has to be trained. Which a lot of people think of it more like a habit, like flossing their teeth, right? I know how to do deep work, I just don't do enough of it, but it really is trained. It really is much more like playing the guitar that if you haven't been practicing, you shouldn't expect that's going to sound very good. Meditation is one of the most important things that I've added to my daily routine. I'm not joking when I say that I would say it's saved my life. That's probably a bit of hyperbole, but wow, did it keep me from getting myself into real emotional trouble in the hardest periods of my life, in the most stressful, where there was the most on the line. It was so comforting to know that I was never more than 45 minutes away from total equanimity. And the only way for me to achieve that is through meditation. So, meditation is a critical part of my daily practice. It is really simple. So, I do what's called just breathe meditation. So, I'm going to take my shoes off here. Any couch will do. Anything that's comfortable. Any chair, wherever you're going to be comfy. And I sit just in a nice simple cross-legged style in a position that I think I can maintain. Usually, I can maintain sitting like this for about 20 to 30 minutes before my feet start going numb. Uh and I found, for whatever reason, that when I touch my hands together, that it creates this sense of like the the energy looping. I don't know. That feels so silly to say, but it was one where I started out doing this, and then I just found myself wanting to do this to rest my hands, not interlace or anything, just really simply in my lap. I sit comfortably. I don't over try to, you know, um have like really strict posture. I actually find the more I sit up, the harder it is to breathe from my diaphragm. So, I have a slight curve to my spine. I sit super comfortably. And then I just breathe. Now, the key thing for me is these bad boys. So, I'm not sponsored by a headphone company, but having the headphones over my ears, that really blocks everything out. I listen to the sounds of nature. So, I'll either do uh if it's a rainy day outside, I'll do a thunderstorm. If it's a nice day outside, I'll do the sound of waves crashing. If it's really early, and so I sort of get to pick what kind of day. I'll usually do a thunderstorm. There's something about the thunderstorm that I find really locks me in. And I think it's because the actual sound of the thunder comes at random intervals. And so, that reminds me to be really present with my breath, to not let my mind wander or start thinking about things. You're really just trying to breathe. Um I do a simple four-part cycle that I learned from Mark Divine. Um I do it differently than he does. What he does is a four equal parts breath. So, you do an inhale, an inhale hold, an exhale, and an exhale hold. And I found that by trying to make those four equal parts, which is known as box breathing, um that I felt a little out of breath, which was not making me relax. And so, finally I just said, "What if I try to maximize the pleasure of each part of the cycle?" So, I would hold the inhale hold, for instance, for only as long as it felt good. I would exhale in a way that felt good. So, for me it's just a a release. I don't try to time it or prolong it. Um and then I found, for whatever reason, the exhale hold was actually the most pleasurable part of the cycle. So, on the inhale I might only hold, I don't know, 4 seconds, 3 or 4 seconds. It's really quite brief. But on the exhale I found myself holding for 10, 15 seconds. And again, I would just start breathing again the moment it stopped being pleasurable to hold that exhale. And by doing that, and so the the length of time may vary as I'm doing the meditation, but by doing that and really being conscious to maximize the pleasure of each part of the breath cycle, then I'm not My mind isn't wandering. I'm there with my breath. I'm there with the pleasure of just breathing. And by doing that, um sometimes if my mind is really going crazy, it might take me, you know, 5 or 10 minutes to get into a zone. When I first started and my life was incredibly stressful, like I said, it could take up to 45 minutes for me to finally get lost in my breath. Um but the fact that I knew that if I just sat there long enough, uh doing that, just bringing my thoughts back to the breath every time they would wander, back to the breath, back to the breath. Nothing complicated about it. Um that I was good. All right, everybody. One of the most important things that you were ever going to do in your routine is to get your diet right. I think that this, outside of having a loving relationship with my wife, I think my diet is the most important thing that I do. And focusing on loving relationships, diet, and sleep, like those are going to be your top three things. So, getting your food right is critically important because um this is the easiest way for me to anchor people around why diet is so important. So, first of all, you literally are what you eat. Literally, at a cellular level, you were made of the things that you consume. So, every cell in your body is from something that you ate. So, let that one sink in. Um and then on top of that, the largest nerve in your body, known as the vagus nerve, 85% of the signals traveling on that nerve are from your body to your brain, not your brain to your body. So, we all have this illusion that we are this consciousness that controls everything when in reality the two work in concert and that the vast majority of the signaling is coming from the body. So, your microbiome is a huge thing. And when you dysregulate your microbiome by eating things that cause disruption, then you're now getting all these signals that your brain is forced to interpret. Okay, this is one of the Read Lisa Feldman Barrett's book How Emotions Are Made. All of the things that you feel, whether it's happiness, sad, um anger, frustration, hopelessness, all of that stuff, is your brain interpreting the signals that it's getting from your body, from the outside world. And once you understand that emotions come from the body first, and then your brain goes, "Hey, the last time that I got these sensations from all over my body, what did that mean?" And then your body assign or your brain, excuse me, assigns a story to that feeling. And now, all of a sudden, when you have a dysregulated microbiome, and the microbiome is crying out for this, that, or the other, all of a sudden your brain adds a story. And I'll give you an easy one, anxiety. In my own life, I will tell you that I've struggled profoundly with anxiety, only to at first think this is entirely in my head, and then finally to realize, no, no, no, this is largely, how largely? This is again a hypothesis, but I have a gut instinct that this is, anxiety is probably 90% your diet, and then 10% what you're thinking about. Meaning, what you think about is stepping on the gas, but if there's no gas in the gas tank, then you're not going to go anywhere. And by dysregulating your microbiome through the things that you eat, you put gas in the gas tank of anxiety, and then your thoughts step on it, boom, there's plenty of gas, and now you're off to the races. So, I'm not saying that your thoughts aren't important, or what's going on in your life isn't important to triggering anxiety. I'm saying it won't escalate the way that it does if you are eating a diet that keeps your gut flora nice and happy. So, that's something I think a lot about. Emotions should never stop you from achieving your goals. So, if you feel stuck, overwhelmed, low on confidence, you're beating yourself up, or you feel like you're not deserving of the things you want in life, I have something to tell you. Emotions are not facts, and you should never let them hold you back. And yet, I find that people do this all the time. They mistake that feeling for objective truth and it sends them in this downward spiral. Reaching greater levels of success in life means knowing how to use your brain. And if you're in a rut right now, or if you've been struggling for a while to achieve your goals, then I've pulled a class from Impact Theory University to help you get back on track. It's called Six Steps to Getting Unstuck and it's for anyone who wants to know the exact steps to achieving big goals when life puts challenges in your way. If you want to check it out, go to unstuck.impacttheory.com to get access. It's a free preview. All right, guys, I'll see you on the inside. Now, let's get back to today's episode. And do you feel like when you are on, like right now, right? This is the recording. Do you feel like you've built that skill set? Um well, so I on this thing in particular, the ability to stay focused and to let go, I am I am constantly practicing. But yeah, I think that I am pretty good at it. I'm pretty good at it though because I do things in my life all the time that I look at as practice. And one that I'll give people that that this is you want to talk about something that's overlooked. And a big part of this is because um I failed to turn Siri off. So, uh that my bad. So, she may Every time I say HEY, she's going to pop up. Um so, growing up in the '80s, video games were frowned upon. Parents were like, you're going to rot your brain and all this stuff. And then, of course, we watched, you know, people generate enormous fortunes. It eclipsed the film industry. It's just it it it has become a beast of such untold proportions. I don't think people understand really how big video games are. And part of the reason is there's there's real neurological training that's going on. So, I play first-person shooters, or I should say I play a first person shooter called Destiny 2. [ __ ] love it, man. It is so much fun. I have a ton of fun with Lisa and my sister, and we're a fire team, it's amazing. So, there's that, right? The family bonding. But, the part that I use all the time is I know on the other end of that is a 14-year-old kid in Ohio that wants to kill me and then teabag my body. And that is so frustrating, and it's so obnoxious, and it [ __ ] literally lights a fire. So, in those moments, I'm like, this is a perfect time. Cuz if you elevate, like if you click into fight or flight, if you let yourself get panicky, then your performance goes down. So, it's like literally every weekend for 3 hours a day, I'm in this mode of I'm practicing staying calm and what could be a sort of fight or flight moment. The cool thing about video games is like I'm constantly asking myself, okay, if this whole practice idea, how do you get the stakes up? Because when there's no stakes, then you don't have the real emotional reaction that you would, and it's actually dealing with the emotional reaction is the very [ __ ] thing you need to practice. So, you've said that there's a big difference between repetition and deliberate practice. So, how and even I, like a lot of what I do is probably a little too close to just repetition, and it's the far too rare moment where I really stop and think about, wait, what piece of this can I break off and do until I'm good at that piece and then reinsert it back into the whole so I'm not just repeating it. Yeah. Um so, how can people conceptualize the difference between repetition and actual deliberate practice? Right, because repetition after an initial point, when you're completely new to something, repetition does not make you better. Um and this is not it's not obvious, right? I mean, there there's actually this interesting performance psychology literature starting in the '70s that was trying to really understand how do people become masters at things? And repetition was one of the the hypothesis. Maybe you do it a lot. Turns out that's not the case. Um other people thought it was understanding the world, maybe building up the right mental models. That's not the case. It's deliberate practice. And so, what's the difference? Deliberate practice stretches you. You you stretch yourself past where you're comfortable with the just like you do with a muscle, right? You have to tire out the muscle, exhaust it if you're going to if you're going to get growth, right? But, it's very uncomfortable. Stretching is uncomfortable. Uh and that's why people don't do it. But, like when I was trying to upgrade my writing, so I my first three books I wrote as a student and they were student advice books uh paperback. And I wanted to be an idea book hard cover idea book writer. Um I kind of went out to the wilderness for a while and I said, "I have to get better at writing." And what I was discovering was like just writing on my blog, for example, wasn't stretching me enough. And so, I said, "I'm going to write for magazines." I found the magazine where, you know, they paid for commissions and there was an editor who was going to accept or reject it. So, now I could deliberately practice. I had the stretch to try to get my my assignments accepted and published you know, by this magazine, right? It wasn't just repeating what I was doing before. Now, I was trying to stretch myself and I did that for a year. Uh and it made a big difference. And so, that's deliberate practice. Speaking was always the thing that I got early wins in. So, even when I was young, I was able to um talk fairly rapidly, but ultimately you're getting to the point where you've maxed out your natural ability and now you're trying to push it. You're trying to go beyond and that got hard as hell for me. And I spent a lot of hours practicing, practicing always at the edge of my competence, which the real danger being at the edge of your competence, if you don't have a growth mindset, is it makes you feel badly about yourself, which makes you want to go into the psychological immune system and begin to protect yourself from that. So, as you're doing math problems that are hard for you and really start making you feel stupid, which is exactly what happens, you're going to want to back off. You're going to want to go into places that you're better, stronger, that you have uh you're dipping into your more natural talents and you're not pushing those to the um edge of your abilities, but that's the way to keep your life small. That is not the way to become extraordinary. So, you really just have to admit this is going to be hard. This is going to make me feel stupid. This is going to make me feel badly about myself, but on a long enough timeline, if I keep doing this, if I keep practicing, I keep pushing myself, what I'm doing is extending extending that region of where you start to feel stupid. So, is it kind of like meditation where I'm learning to extend those periods of time where I'm able to focus or what is at work? Right. Well, it's a very unnatural activity, actually. So, so giving sustained concentration, doing deep thinking, uh it's not something that has a long evolutionary history. Uh and so, it's actually really the invention of the written word, in particular, that helped make the ability to think deeply more widespread. Did you say the written word? The written word. Written. That makes a lot more sense. Yeah. Well, because reading itself, right, is also a very unnatural activity. And it requires an incredible amount of training to basically get your brain able to do this activity that we didn't evolve to do. But what you get out of doing reading is that your mind becomes comfortable with this very unnatural activity of keeping intense focus on something, right? Um so, so in some sense, it's not something that we were evolved to do. And so, if we don't practice it, our mind wants to do what it did in the the Paleolithic Savannah. What's going on? Like, I want to survey. Is there Is there like a mastodon over there? Is there like my tribe member in trouble over there? Except for now, it's Is there someone on Twitter? Is there someone But it's the same That's that same instinct. And so, it's something that has to be practiced. Uh we used to get this practice sort of in our schooling, right? Because it when you're going through college, for example, before we had, let's say, wireless internet or or cell phones, there was just a lot of time in a library. And it was you and a book. And And there was no distractions around you. You would have to walk all the way back to your dorm or something. So, like, we would get hours and hours of just sort of practicing reading deeply, concentrating. But we've lost a lot of that now because, you know, even in like the college environment, you're you're constantly doing this, you're constantly doing this while you're looking at things. And so, we actually are missing a lot of the necessary training that I think you need if you're going to be comfortable. But I argue it's really worth it because so few people are actually training their ability to concentrate that if you're one of the few to do so, you have a huge competitive advantage. When you wake up in the morning, you are in a perfect position to what I call receive the download of all the work that your neural circuitry has been doing the night before. But if you immediately go to a sensory experience, especially a rich sensory experience of stuff scrolling by, you're actually missing the information that you processed at night. And even more importantly, that second half of the night during REM sleep is when the emotional weight of things start becomes let's say you put it on the shelf properly. Things that are important to emotional emotionally register get put in one shelf. Things that were like the comment you got on Twitter that was triggering, doesn't seem like such a big deal after a good night's sleep. And that's because that second half of sleep is actually when you re-experience these things, but your body can't secrete adrenaline. It's kind of an internal form of therapy or even trauma therapy. Yes. And that's why people who don't get that sleep are very, you know, they're easily agitated, they feel like the world is crushing down on them. So, when I wake up in the morning, I want to receive ideas that I want to learn from my learning. And if you take in new information, you are not in a position to do that. And 60 minutes is a tough one. So, I give myself two no-gos for the 60-minute block if I can do it. And I'll tell you a lot of mornings I fail, Tom. I don't do it. Interesting. I make the 30 minutes shocking, but I heard you say that in another interview and I was like Well, I mean, I'm human, you know, there are mornings where um I get enticed or worse worse, I find myself reflexively picking up the phone without having made the conscious decision. And that's when I realized that you know, we are all deep in this process and I think uh we have to regulate it. The The experiment I'd like to do, maybe you'll do this with me as a challenge cuz a challenge is always good, is in the new year I actually want to take every odd waking hour of the day off the phone. So, even hours of the day as long as it's waking, I'm willing to have it on and work with it. But, odd hours, just turn it off no matter what. I don't know if this will destroy most of the relationships in my life, but but just to see, can I do it on a rigidly externally imposed schedule? Because if you think about most of the growth in life comes from these rigidly externally imposed schedules and we hate them. But, they are where we learn restraint. Okay, any routine, whether it's morning, your full day, it all starts the night before. Getting a good night's sleep. I cannot stress this enough. As somebody who absolutely resents needing to sleep, it's still the number one thing that I prioritize. So, that is critical that you prep for that. So, number one, I start wearing blue blocking glasses at least 3 hours before bedtime. I actually use a little device that zaps me, but I'll save that for another video since I'm on the board, the advisory board of that company. Um but, I do everything that I can to make sure that I sleep optimally including cooling the room down um to very chilly. So, we sleep with our room at 68° and that way you can snuggle up in your blankies and there's something about when your body temperature drops that triggers you to get sleepy. Um so, getting the room nice and cool is another uh big tip. I go to bed at 9:00 p.m. every night like it is a religion. I should say Sunday through Thursday night I go to bed at 9:00 p.m. I allow a little bit later bedtime on Friday, a little bit later bedtime on Saturday. But, other than that, 9:00 p.m. and I don't set an alarm ever unless I have like a super early flight or something like that. Um and I've been doing that for like 17 years now or something like that. So, I built multiple successful companies without setting an alarm. So, trust me, it is possible. Now, the reason I do it is so that I'm optimizing my cognition. I get as much sleep as I need. Um so, for me, that's about 7 and 1/2 hours probably on average. I sleep with headphones right next to my bed. In fact, as you can see, they are right here. And I do that because I oftentimes wake up in the middle of the night. Put these bad boys in. And I can fall right back to sleep. I listen to a book very, very low volume so that just so that if I put a tiny bit of pressure on my ear that I can hear it and then that way as I roll around it will come ever so slightly out and then I just fall asleep and I forget that the book is there. So, that was a game-changer for me. I don't know if that'll be as useful for anybody else, but I used to lie in bed for hours in the middle of the night trying to fall back asleep. This has been a game-changer. And that's it. I sleep in nice, loose clothing. Um Mouth tape. OH! YES. SO, here it is. I'm so glad that you reminded me of that. This is why my wife is here filming it. I tape my mouth closed every night. Uh I did an episode with James Nestor. You should check that episode out. He talks about um breathing through your nose and how important it is. So, I literally tape my mouth closed. That also significantly improved my sleep. So, I wouldn't have believed it until I tried it. So, now literally every night I kiss my wife. I tell her I love her and then I put tape over my lips. A single piece about that long and then I just put it over my mouth. Shall we? And this will be my goodbye. All right. Here we go. Take This is just medical tape, first aid tape. Looks like 1.5 cm. And I do a piece about that long. That's it. Tell my wife I love her. I love you, baby. Love you, baby. And then I tape up. Tape up. So, all right guys, till next time. Be legendary. Take care.