Men Talking Mindfulness

Author Steven Kotler: Creativity, Flow, and Altering Consciousness

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Episode notes

We are so excited to have with us today 10 times best-selling author Steven Kotler.  Will and I are huge fans and have read several of his books and today we will talk about achieving peak performance, creativity, passion, flow, and altered consciousness!

Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. He is the author of ten bestsellers (out of fourteen books), including The Art of Impossible, The Future is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance… and today we will touch on his NEW novel out now, The Devil’s dictionary.  His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 50 languages, and has appeared in over 100 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, TIME, and the Harvard Business Review.

A lifelong environmentalist and animal rights advocate, Steven is the cofounder of Planet Home, a conference/concert/innovation accelerator focused on solving critical environmental challenges, the cofounder of The Forest + Fire Collective, a network of individuals, organizations and institutions dedicated to ending catastrophic wildfire and restoring forest health to the American West. Alongside his wife, author Joy Nicholson, he is also the co-founder of Rancho de Chihuahua, a hospice care and special needs dog sanctuary.

Find out more about Steven here: https://www.stevenkotler.com

Books:  https://www.stevenkotler.com/books

Announcements

Retreat:  We have our Mindfulness Adventure Retreaet Sept 16-19th -we would love for you to join us to learn more head to - https://mentalkingmindfulness.com/retreat or listen to Jon and I chatting about it on MTM here is that link: https://pod.fo/e/131ab1

MTM Summer Merch Sale going on now with our new Custom Designed SuperMTM Tee Shirt if you would like to see what this is all about head too:  https://mentalkingmindfulness.com/merch

Time Stamps:

00:30 Creativity, Flow, and Altered Consciousness with Steven Kotler

01:30 Join us on our retreat! mentalkingmindfulness.com/retreat

02:00 Get your Summer MTM Merch! mentalkingmindfulness.com/merch

03:00 Introducing Steven Kotler

05:00 Will leads Opening Grounding Practice (~2 min)

07:30 Why Steven writes

10:00 How philosophy and psychology have evolved

16:00 Little and Big i’s

20:00 Little and Big Steven

23:00 Fear and goals

31:00 Focus!

34:30 Speed work

36:30 How Steven deals with writer’s block

41:00 Why you should start with something silly

48:00 The process for fiction vs non-fiction

51:00 Getting into flow state

55:00 Steven’s “Zero to Dangerous” Course

58:00 To be or not be in a flow state

1:01:00 Check out Steven’s other interviews

1:03:30 Jon leads Closing Practice (~2 min)

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