Stephen Collar

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310 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard Jan 2025

Stephen Collar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Home Service Expert Podcast · Achieving 500% Productivity Through Flow States · 10 Jan 2025 podcast

the merger of action and awareness, vanishing or disappearing of the sense of self, time dilation, time passes strangely, and then there's two other things. There's a sense of control, I look at you in flow and it looks from the outside looking in, it looks like peak performance. I see Michael Jordan in flow. He's just putting buckets.

On the inside, it feels like, oh shit, I can control things I couldn't normally control. This could be Michael Jordan. He used to talk about being in the zone, being in flow. The basket looks as big as a hula hoop, but I can't miss. Me in flow is a writer. Suddenly my sentences are sort of dancing around the page at four o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday.

That's not usually what happens, like right when I sit down at 4 a.m., but, you know, that's what will happen. Or it's a great brainstorming session where the idea is just ping-ponging out that sense of control. Then the other, the last one, and this is where I was going, this is the point, is flow is described as an autotelic experience.

Autotelic is a Greek word, and all it means is an end in itself. It means flow is so joyful, so ecstatic, so much fun. If I were to put it in addiction terms, I would say flow is the most

addictive state on earth it is it's just a positive addiction it leads us forward into the future that we want to go to rather than most addictions which lead us backwards and drag us down but flow is it's the same you know same reason yeah i see i you know if you want to use addiction positive or negative i would maybe frame it this way it's like you know flow expands you the opposite contracts you yeah that's great that's great okay so when you can make the clear goals list

Your daily to-do list and autotelic experience, meaning the completion of all the items on your clear goals list, generates, is joyful, drops you into flow. So it becomes its own motivation. That's my goal. If I can get you to there, right, you're dangerous.

So one of the things that happens, and you guys are going to totally agree with me on this, what you get from that clear goals list, and I'm not talking about like, I got everything done on my list today, but I've now done it for like, five years in a row, and you know what happens.

If you get everything done in your clear goals list day after day after day, you get way more done than you could possibly shake a stick at. So you end up looking back on your five years and you're like, look what I did. So when you take criticism and you've got that kind of track record where your clear goals list is automatic and you've done that,

you've built, because what really gets built with that is the confidence that you can produce at a really high level. You can meet your goals. This is the other thing people don't realize. They set goals. If you don't meet your goals, You're training your brain that it's okay to not meet your goals.

You're training your brain that it's okay to be a loser, to not be who you want to be, not live the way you are. You're always teaching yourself something. You're either teaching yourself this is the good way to go or this is the bad way to go. We don't accomplish our goals. I always tell people,

Don't ever, ever, ever speak your goal out loud unless you were absolutely, like if I say it out loud, my word is my bond is going to get done no matter what. And it's not even about as much about integrity or honesty or all those things that matter. It's about the fact that if I set a goal and I don't accomplish it, I'm training my brain that it's okay to not accomplish goals.

And your brain is an energy efficient engine. Once you start not accomplishing your goals and your brain goes, oh, it's okay if you don't accomplish your goals, I don't even need to generate the energy. So if you break your word to yourself, every time you set a goal and you don't keep it, you're breaking your word to yourself, you're training your brain. It's okay to fail. It's fine to fail.

That's just fine. And after a little while, your brain goes, oh, you're not going to succeed anyways because you just say this shit. It's not real. We're not even going to bother getting in the fight. It works the same way. You understand the neuroscience of mindset, right?

If you have a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset, when they look in the brains of people who have fixed mindsets, when things go wrong, they don't learn from their mistakes because the brain doesn't even turn on the learning machinery because why waste the energy? If you've got a fixed mindset that you can't grow, you believe your talent is innate. There's nothing you can do.

You can't grow from this. So your brain just stops producing the energy completely. This is Carol Dweck's work. And we also discovered if you have a fixed mindset, it blocks flow for the same reason. So these are two of the things that we've discovered along the way. People with regular gratitude practice and people with a growth mindset have way more flow.

So I always tell people, we talked about the challenge skills balance, right? there's actually a number. So Csikszentmihalyi put a number on it. With a Google mathematician, they were like, when your challenge is 4% greater than your skills, that's the sweet spot for maximizing flow and focus.

So, and Tommy, you were talking about this earlier, you and I both set these impossible goals, like really crazy, big, high, hard goals, but you chunk it down. So what's in front of you today- It's 4%, right? 4% to 5%. In fact, my favorite story is Alex Honnold, who everybody knows from Free Solo, right? So I like the Half Dome story.

So 10 years before he climbed El Cap, he Free Soloed Half Dome in 2012. So Half Dome, Yosemite, it takes about most climbers about a day and a half to climb it. They bring portal edges. They sleep on the side of the wall. Alex Free Soloed it. So no portal edges, no ropes. You fall, you die. Everything's through the roof. Most people take about a day and a half to climb it.

As I said, Alex climbed Half Dome in an hour and 22 minutes. It's like the rough equivalent of running a four minute mile in 43 seconds. Like that's essentially what it's the, in my, like if you say, Steven, what's the craziest, most impossible thing you've ever seen anybody do? That's the one. I mean, maybe there are others, but like for my money, that's the thing that I look at.

I'm just like, but if you ask Alex, How did you do it? Like, how the hell do you do these impossible things? He'll say the same thing. He'll say 4% plus 4% plus 4% day after day, week after week, year after year for a career. That's how you do the impossible. That's always how you do the impossible. There's no other formula. This is how we're designed to work.

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