Part 2: The Creativity Advantage with Steven Puri

Your calendar can be full and your team can still be stuck. We get into the real reason: creativity doesn’t die from lack of talent, it dies from lack of safety and lack of uninterrupted focus.

Steven Puri returns to The Talent Forge and shares two unforgettable Hollywood stories that land on a practical leadership lesson: when the room feels safe, people offer more ideas, iterate faster, and the best idea can win, no matter where it comes from. We connect that to the neuroscience behind insight, including the default mode network versus the executive mode network, and why your brain often solves the hard problem when you stop staring at it. 

From there, we bring AI and large language models into the picture. If LLMs can repeat patterns at scale, what’s the human advantage? Steven’s answer points to relationships, original thinking, and deep work that moves your craft forward. We also break down flow state using Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research, what it feels like, why multitasking is really context switching, and how leaders can design schedules that allow 20+ minutes of ramp-in time to reach real focus.

We also get surprisingly tactical: focus music, rain loops, coffee shop ambience, white noise and green noise, and why the right audio cue can pull you back into productive concentration. If you want more innovation, better execution, and less burnout, this is a blueprint you can test immediately.

About Steven Puri: Steven is one of the few people on Earth who has been a senior executive at two motion picture studios and also raised over $20MM in venture capital. He’s produced the digital effects for Independence Day, which won the Oscar for Visual Effects, and in addition to his film work, he’s founded 3 start-ups - one successful exit and two failures. Steven lectures now on the lessons in sustainable high-performance he learned working alongside some of the world’s more productive people. 

Interested in being a guest on The Talent Forge? Contact our producer, Madison Bennett, via email: madison@coeuscreativegroup.com.

Meet the Host
Jay Johnson works with people and organizations to empower teams, grow profits, and elevate leadership. He is a Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements®, a two-time TEDx speaker, and a designated Master Trainer by the Association for Talent Development. With a focus on behavioral intelligence, Jay has delivered transformational workshops to accelerate high-performance teams and cultures in more than 30 countries across four continents. For inquiries, contact jay@behavioralelements.com or connect below!

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayjohnsonccg/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jayjohnsonccg/
Speaker Website - https://jayjohnsonspeaks.com

Transcript

Welcome And Why This Redo

Jay Johnson 0:39

Welcome to this episode of the Talent Forge, where we are shaping future behaviors in the workplace. I am super excited because this is a little bit of a redo, but it's for the first time here on the Talent Forge. Welcome to the show, Steven. We are glad to have you back and here for the first time all again. I'll explain that to you. Indeed.

Steven Puri 0:58

Welcome. I can only say the first time we tried this and there were technical difficulties, clearly the universe was like, you guys should practice. And I gave you a practice run, so this is going to be great.

From Film Executive To Flow Research

Jay Johnson 1:08

Well, if the last one, if this one is nearly as fun and insightful as the last one, then the audience is in for a treat. So why don't we kick kick off the same way we did the last time? Tell us a little bit about yourself, Steven. How did you get into this sort of behavioral talent space? Yeah, give us give us the rundown.

Steven Puri 1:28

So of the many episodes that Jay has done with a variety of people, um, the thing about this episode that may be interesting to you is I'm one of the few people you'll meet who's been a senior executive at a couple motion picture studios. So I've worked with a lot of creative types and you know, mass markets or a high-pressure environment. I've also raised over $20 million of venture and run startups, three startups, one successful exit, two failures, right? And it's true, you'll learn more from the failures, let's be honest, right? So in the course of doing that, notice the patterns of how did high performing teams work together. I'm not an HR executive. I'm much more into sort of the neuroscience of like, how do people encourage in themselves and in others high performance? And that led me to go deep on flow states. And uh our last version of this was great. I hope we hit some of those points, but I'm sure it'll be fresh and new. So that's what that's why to listen to this episode of his many good ones.

Jay Johnson 2:25

Well, thank you for that, Steven. So I do want to dig in on what is it like? And and because this is something that I think every entrepreneurial endeavor, every and even organizations that have been around for a long time, they need innovation, they need creativity, they need new ideas, new thoughts. And when we think about something like the film industry, and you had you've had some incredible experiences, and I hope that you can share a couple of those. But what is it like when you're in an environment where you need creativity? You need to, you know, because a lot of people say, well, every movie's the same, it's just taking certain things.

Steven Puri 3:06

But they all have to, right? I mean, we can talk on our thing here.

Jay Johnson 3:10

If if if we look at the hero story or, you know, the journey or anything else like that. Yes. But every now and then we get something that really inspires us or really is, hey, it takes that, you know, the it takes the common tropes and it just does something just a little differently. And somebody somewhere had some safety and had some opportunity to think through that and come up creatively. What is it like to work in that creative space, or how do we get creativity out of people?

The Bart Story And Brain Networks

Steven Puri 3:38

You know what it is incredibly well observed of you to use the word safety in that question. So we're gonna go deep for a moment on the film side of my career. There are two stories that I want to tell that'll illustrate part of the answer to your question, right? My thoughts on the answer to your question. Um when we talk about creativity, like you have you are the leader of a creative team, or you are an individual contributor on a team, you're a copywriter, you're a designer, you may be a developer, an engineer. There are many things you do, but you have to generate, right? You and I are having this conversation in a time when every podcast episode is out about AI eating your job, right? It's pretty much the entire Apple Podcast and Spotify podcast is like, what happens with AI? So yeah, we're not gonna ignore the elephant of the room, but let me tell you two stories that predate AI, and then let's put sort of put them in modern context. Is that fair?

Jay Johnson 4:35

Yeah, perfect.

Steven Puri 4:36

Okay. So one story is this. When I was getting out of the University of Southern California, which is where I went to undergraduate, and started working in film, which, as you might remember, was an odd thing for me because I was actually trained as an engineer. I was a computer programmer who fell into film because film became digital and they needed people who spoke engineer, but were personable enough they could speak to a director about what the should the thing looked like, right? So my first gig was I was working at an ad agency that did trailers and music videos for movies. A lot of the Warner Brothers uh Buena Vista, which is Disney uh MGM stuff, and run by two very well respected guys in their 30s, 40s who've been doing this TV film. For the purpose of the story, Jeff, one of the two principals, calls me Stevie. He's the only guy who's ever called me Stevie. You shouldn't call me Stevie, but he was my boss. He just loved calling me Stevie, okay? So my job at the company is we would get in rough cuts of movies. Oh, next summer there's gonna be the Sony's doing a Will Ferrell comedy with John C. Riley. Here's a rough cut of the movie. Can you write us a trailer? Give us some ideas of how to promote this, right? So my job was saying, let me assign that to a writer-producer. Oh, you know, Jay did that great job last year with that uh Will Ferrell comedy at MGM. Like, let's see if what he does with this, right? So I'm assigned this. Jeff comes in my office. I'm like 20 years old, right? He's 40. And he goes, Stevie, uh, you know Bart? And I'm like, uh, there's a guy in the vault named Bart, like uh delivers tapes and stuff. I I think I've been in the elevator with him. Yeah, he seems nice. He's like, Have you ever given Bart a trailer to write? We're talking about Bart who like picks up lunch and stuff, like delivers film right now. Uh I haven't, Jeff. Where are you going with this? He goes, Stevie, I have an instinct about him. Jeff, your name's on the door, man. Okay, let me find something for him. So I found him like a Warner Brothers B title that had like a month deadline. So if he comes back after a week or two, he's like, I hate this, I just want to deliver coffee. I can give it to Jay, the pro and he'll knock it out that night. You know what I mean? Jeff comes to my office two days later. Hey, Stevie, how's Bart doing? Jeff, he's never written a trailer before. Um it's been two days. I'm gonna give him through the weekend. Okay, okay, that's fair. Uh, what else did you give him? He's never ridden a trailer before. I gave him one, I don't want him to blow his brains, but like trying to write two things. And Jeff said, Stevie, Stevie, Stevie, let me explain to you. Creativity is always about the other thing. If you give him one trailer to focus on, he's gonna stare at that with little beads of sweat coming down his temples, and he's gonna have every obvious bad instinct on that trailer watch, just watch. He said the part of your brain that does the, I don't know, what would chocolate and peanut butter taste like together? That's not the part you think you're thinking with. You have to give him another movie. So when he's thinking about that, he's gonna have the idea, oh, you know what? I should do another thing. And can I tell you in the rest of my film career and so far in my tech career, how many times I've thought of Jeff as I've seen that exact thing proven true. There's a great book on the neuroscience of it called The Net and the Butterfly, which talks about why this is true. I don't know if you've experienced this, Jay, where you have a great idea at driving, swimming, showering, doing the dishes. Oh yeah, right?

Jay Johnson 7:58

Yep.

Steven Puri 7:58

Oh yeah. Because you have from an early age a default mode network, which is like the um, to be very reductive, like the baby, the child. It's one that looks at a fault cell phone's like, what does that taste like? Well, I don't know, you know, put it in my mouth, right? And then you develop the executive mode network, which is more like the adult in the room. Gotta get our homework done by Tuesday. Oh, I have to do my TPS reports Friday morning, gotta pick up the kid. That sort of thing, right? Now, here's the interesting thing. That default mode network, the one that goes, what does that cell phone taste like? What if chocolate fell in my peanut butter? That gets to play when the executive mode network is busy executing actions, which is why when you're out running, you're driving, you're doing the dishes, you're showering, whatever, and that mode is like that network is busy, that the default mode goes, Hey man, I have an idea. You want to hear something crazy? Want to hear something crazy? How about now? How about now? Right. Um, so the reason I share this is whether you want to come at it from a neuroscience point of view or solely, you know, experiential point of view of like, oh yeah, I've been in that situation. You can look at that as an IC and say, okay, how am I developing that in myself? Because if I stare at the thing, it's not going to leap out at me in maybe its best form. And if you're a leader, you understand you need to challenge people by saying, I'm giving you multiple things to work on so that in the back of your mind, I know the default mode network is going, oh, hold on, no one's watching. I'm gonna come up with that cool crazy idea. Uh fair? Are we good so far? Yeah. Okay.

Jay Johnson 9:26

Uh totally, because I I even think about this in terms of like, it's always when you set the problem down, you end up coming up with the solution to the like, oh, what was that song? Gosh, I can't remember. And you're like focused on it, focused on it, and then all of a sudden you shift away, and it's like in the middle of a conversation about, you know, uh turkey dinner, and you're like, that song, it was this.

Spielberg’s Response To Being Challenged

Steven Puri 9:51

It was Barry Manolo's Cobacabana. I love this thing. You know what's even better? The French have an expression for exactly that. The the thing you think of once you've left the conversation, and it's called les mots d'escalier, which means literally like the staircase words. Like you're on the staircase leaving the meeting, and you're like, that's what I was trying to like remember. That's awesome. Okay, so that's one story. Now I'm gonna tell you a second story, and I'm gonna change some of the details uh in in the story out of respect. You'll understand. So later in my career, as my career has evolved from being like guy assigning trailers to writer producers, to I became an uh, you know, through hard work and a lot of luck, an executive vice president at DreamWorks for Kurtzmanorsi, right? And this is the era of Stacey Snyder and Steven running DreamWorks. So this is around, you know, Transformers went into Star Trek 11, Eagle Eye, like that, that era. I remember, even though I'd been in all these rooms, like I'd worked with Mel on Braveheart, worked with Jim Cameron on like David Fincher on seven, like a lot of stuff, right? So at a certain point, you kind of like lose the excitement of like, oh my God, we've got a meeting with Cameron today. You're like, oh God, not today, right? So I will tell you honestly, the first time I had a meeting, a story meeting in Steven Spielberg's private conference room, you know, in the we were on the Amblin compound, which is like this beautiful southwestern adobe sort of thing that he had custom built on the Universal lot for himself, right? I did have a moment of like, pinch me. I'm sitting in Steven Spielberg's, like at his like 10-person conference table, you know, the rough hewn, cool, like handmade table. I'm sitting here at Steven Spielberg, it's like four feet to my left. Like, how did life, how did this happen in life, right? But of course you have to play it cool, like I'm totally belong here, we're all good. I do something, right? I'm sitting there and it's Steven and Stacy, the president of DreamWorks, uh, another executive, um, two writers, producers I was working with. And so we're sitting there, we're having this story meaning around a project, and this is where I'm gonna falsify some of the details out of respect to Steven, right? Let's just say it's a project that involves aliens. And you're sitting there with Steven Spielberg, who has done some of the best known alien movies on our he spent a lot of time thinking about aliens, right? Okay, yes. So Steve will say something, and he said something uh like so that next scene, this is where the alien comes through the wall, but then in coming through the wall, we realize he's like allergic to dust or water or something. You know, right now this or something, right? Everyone is like Steven just said that write that down, right? The writer's like noted scene 15.

Jay Johnson 12:34

Yeah, right.

Steven Puri 12:34

Now, someone who was passing through the room, I'm gonna call Coffee Boy, right? Hears this and says, Oh, you know, I feel like we saw that last year in this other movie. What if it were this other thing? And I thought to myself, oh, that's so adorable. It's the last time I'm gonna see Coffee Boy alive. Like he'll be in small pieces and adopter my dream works. Like that was a great story.

Jay Johnson 12:59

Did you just question Steven Spielberg?

Steven Puri 13:02

Exactly. Is there like a trapdoor you fall through and it just like feeds you to meet grind? Like, what happens? And Steven just looked up without batting in. I was like, Oh, you know, this that's better. We should go, let's do that. And the meeting just moved forward, and I thought to myself, that's what confidence looks like in creativity. About it's not about my idea, man. It's not about your idea, it's about best idea. We're trying to make the best movie we can. And there wasn't even like a blip. There wasn't like a oh, he contradicted me. It was like, oh no, yeah, yeah, that's good, we should do that. And we just move forward. And I made a note to myself going, Wow, the safety he just created in everybody in the room is how he continually attracts the best writers and directors to work at his studio. You know, it's incredible. And so that is why when you said the word safety, I was like, oh, Jay, we'll just talk about that. Not a lot of people get that.

Jay Johnson 13:55

What a powerful, I mean, that is such an incredible story, Steven. Because I'm I'm sitting here and I'm thinking to myself, I would have thought the same thing, like, wow, the audacity of this coffee boy, you know, firing off. And and then to see a leader, and and and I'm hoping the audience can take that away, is Steven Spielberg has every right to a very big ego.

Steven Puri 14:21

And that was Steve doesn't have one, Jay.

Jay Johnson 14:23

I'm just saying, I mean, there's always there's always going to be some aspect, but I mean, like to set that aside and say, hey, that idea is better, let's go forward with that. I mean, something so simple in a meeting, thinking about just a lot of the executives that have worked with, if if the coffee boy was in the room and challenged, you know, uh, the financial forecast of something like, okay, what do you know about financial forecasting? Or what do you know about X, Y, and Z? There would be this like tension or animosity rather than being like, hmm, that's really good. Yeah, actually, let's let's give that a shot. So completely beautiful representation.

A Simple Tool To Protect Ideas

Steven Puri 15:01

I think we're in sync about this. And I hope, you know, those listening or playing along at home or in the car, this is directionally helpful for you about like people who, I think, inarguably at the top of their game, create this. And I'll tell you this what I saw is a lot of the mid-level, let's say the mediocre players, are the ones that become very precious with their ideas. And it stifles creativity, right? If I feel like I have three ideas, two of them might be really bad, one might be brilliant, but I don't know which one it is. And you, Jay, make me feel okay saying all three, and then you're never gonna blame me for the two bad ideas. I'm gonna continually just bubble up ideas on your team, right? And that's because you create that environment. So um, I promised that we would use the buzzword AI. So I don't want to not deliver on that promise. Shall we talk about that for a moment?

Jay Johnson 15:54

We shall. I'm gonna share with you real quick a funny story, and it and it's about that idea generation. I had uh when I was working in the university, I had one of the most brilliant minds in mathematics and engineering that I was working with. And he at one point in time sat me down and looked at me and said, Jay, I'm gonna come up with 10 different ideas every single day. Nine of those ideas should literally never see the light of day. One of those ideas might be okay. It's your job to help me figure out which one's which and which one we're gonna pursue. And I'm just like, oh, no pressure. But I mean, it was literally like that. It was just like, I'm gonna toss these out. Your job's to help me sort through those. So when you said that, I just to have this uh, you know, this mental image of that.

Steven Puri 16:41

But what he said to you, even though yes, we consider mathematics and physics and these sciences to be hard, sort of binary yes-no kind of um endeavors. It's very true. What he said to you is like, hey man, I've got a whole bunch of ideas. I need you to help me sift through them and find the gold. Like it's a it's applicable in many ways. So I think the takeaway, obviously, for people who come to your pod is if you are creating an environment where you want to reduce you know burnout and frustration, increase the the way good ideas get bubbled up and selected, then these are just simple things you can do, and they come from you. They radiate outwards from the leader, right?

Jay Johnson 17:26

I think the the the last takeaway that I want to share there is the importance of not disparaging the nine ideas. And you said this in you said this earlier is that that person felt safe to say something, or they had the audacity to say something, and then all of a sudden everybody else feels safe. But I have seen so many times where after the meeting somebody says, you know, we could maybe do this, and it's like, well, why didn't you bring that up in the meeting? And it was because of that lack of safety. So making sure that as leaders or as trainers or as coaches, whatever we might be, that we create that space of not necessarily that there's no bad ideas, but there's ideas that we're not going to pursue, but celebrating even somebody bringing something to the forefront.

Steven Puri 18:13

Can I give you the easiest tool to use for that?

Jay Johnson 18:18

Absolutely. I love it.

Steven Puri 18:21

So let's suppose, yes, I'm on your team, Jay. I have three ideas. I think one's great. I don't know which one. I have 10 ideas as an engineer. I think one's great, and I need you to sort them out, right? To make me feel safe, because sometimes Steven and Jay might have a good relationship where I'm like, hey, Jay protects me, he's you know helping me get the best out of me. But there's also George next to me who wants to disparage my ideas because he sees me as competitive, right? And that's a real thing, right?

Jay Johnson 18:48

Yep, yeah.

Steven Puri 18:50

The way in which you let me say something like, I don't know, two and two might be five, I'm just toying with does anyone feel that way? And before George can go like you're an idiot, established before, the thing that is so easy to diffuse all that is to say, how many times have I seen the idea we didn't use as the springboard for someone else to come up with the other idea? So if you don't say the thing that you might even think is stupid, you take away the ability for the person next to you to say, oh, not that, but this.

Jay Johnson 19:26

That's true. That iteration, that sort of like prototyping, testing, and moving forward, such a powerful aspect. And we lose a lot when somebody is not sharing their insight because they may be holding that puzzle piece that actually unlocks the rest of it. So really well said, Steven. I love that. All right, let's move forward. AI. Sorry, derail this again. Yeah.

AI Anxiety And The Human Edge

What Flow State Feels Like

Steven Puri 19:49

Yeah, here we go. Here we go. And let's be clear like people right now are using the term AI, conflating it with LLMs, large language models largely, right? Where it's like, oh, hey, I can get this LLM to do this kind of repetitive work for me because it's been pattern trained on all the repetitive workout in the world, right? So um, there's a lot to AI, and I don't want to um diminish the other parts of the machine learning, the deep learning, all the things, right? But let's talk about this because everyone who's in a knowledge field is looking at, ooh, can I lay everyone off on my team and just use agents? Or, oh shit, I'm gonna get laid off because there's an agent doing my job, right? Okay, yeah, right. So so let's talk about that. Because yes, the steam engine is going to replace you know, horses and the combustion engine is gonna help, you know, all these things, right? It's progress is going to happen. It's just the force of the economics or such. However, when you think about, well, then what is the value that I bring? Because the value will no longer be, hey, I can follow a pattern of things I've done in the past and do more of that, right? So there are two things that are start starting to stand out. One is as good as LMs are, they don't have relationships, right? There's no authenticity to the relationship. So my ability to call Jay and say, hey, Jay, listen, man, I got an idea. I think there's probably someone in your network that could help me with this. Can you help me? And you're like, oh, Steven, I like you. We have a relationship, we help each other. I can do that, right? So that's something that is still the the ability to build relationships is very important. I don't want to go deep into that one here. Rather, I want to go to the second part, which is something very close to my heart. When you decide to do the thing, as you said in the beginning of this episode, that moves forward the art form. The art form could be financial accounting, it could be design of an app, it could be copywriting, it could be uh, you know, coding uh a new mobile app, whatever it is, right? Yes, an LLM trained on everything that came before is going, it's a LLMs are like Google autocomplete on steroids. I've looked at everything that's ever been written. I can bet the next letter you're gonna type is S. And then it takes that to say, oh, the next word you're probably gonna type is this, oh, the next idea you're probably gonna want is this. And it just sort of puts that together in a way that uh gives the illusion of thought, but it's actually saying, like, hey man, it's probability. Like if you say the weather outside statistics, 40% chance you're gonna say rainy. And when I say rainy, you go, Oh my god, it's so intelligent. No, it's just it knows you live in wherever, right? Okay. So uh if you want to go deep and do something that actually moves the your particular discipline forward, you do that. In units that are not like time between Zoom meetings, you know, and oh, I'm trying to scrape together a couple minutes before I go to lunch, right? It becomes more and more important to actually have dedicated focus time to say, I'm going to go into a flow state. I'm going to, whether I'm a writer, a designer, an engineer, whatever it may be, I'm going to give myself the time for my brain to start blocking out distractions, actually doing the things that later LLMs will be trained on, as opposed to LMs could just regurgitate this because it's what's been done. And I hope we can go during the course of the episode into some of the techniques to achieve that. But that's what I think is super interesting is like even with the advent of the LLMs, relationships are important. And those things you do that only human can push forward the frontier, the pattern is extended, not repeated.

Jay Johnson 23:26

Well, let's dig right into that because uh, you know, and this is something that I found interesting, the concept of flow state. I think people sometimes I do think people sometimes uh let's say they get so excited about being able to multitask. Oh, I'm I'm a fantastic. What is multitasking? What is it? It's it's your brain code switching between two attention functions and pathways very, very quickly because you're not actually focusing. Yeah, you're not actually.

Steven Puri 23:56

Okay, go on.

Jay Johnson 23:57

Right. Um but flow state, I think sometimes can be confusing. It's like, well, am I in flow? When am I in flow? How do I get into flow? And I think that that's such a fascinating conversation, especially when we put it in. Yeah.

Steven Puri 24:11

Let's do that. Go for it. You know this, but let's just, for the benefit of anyone out there who's not a flow master already, some of your audiences, but some of your audience may be like, I have a passing understanding of it, right? Yep. Hungarian American psychologist, Mihai Chin sent Mihai. He had a thesis. He's like, hey man, it's weird the way you can talk to high performers in different disciplines, athletes and artists, and scientists and adventures. And when they talk about those concentrated states where they do the thing that makes them famous, the thing we know them for. The way they describe those states is very similar, even though what they're doing is very different. He's like, What up with that? Right? So thankfully for us, he did the research, did the interviews, at the end of it, wrote a book called Flow. It is the seminal work on this, it's why we call it a flow state. And he said the most the greatest thing. He said, I chose this word because it was the most beautiful metaphor for what I found. We are all on the river, paddling to move ourselves forward. But if you align your boat with the current, it carries you, it magnifies your efforts. And that is what these people figured out how to do. And that was fascinating to me because I'll tell you this. I did not know where a flow state was the first time I experienced, like you said, like, was I in a flow state? I had never heard of it. I couldn't ask myself, was that a flow state? I was flying from Austin, like you know where I am now, to San Francisco. The next day I had a meeting with my team, and there was an idea I had for a feature that I thought with my hacky Figma skills, I'll mock this up so I can kind of show it. And if there's enthusiasm, like designers can finish this and make it work, right? Right. Alaska runs that nonstop. Get on the flight. Captain's like, sorry, kids, Wi-Fi's out, ha ha, see you in San Francisco, you know. So we take off, like I start working. 15, 20 minutes later, we start descending, and I was like, okay, we're in Dallas, like something's wrong with the plane. They're gonna tell us when we're on the ground, like oh, the hydraulics, we're gonna switch you know, equipment or whatever. I looked down, two hours and 40 minutes have gone by. I had no concept. I couldn't tell you if the drink cart had come down the aisle. Yep. But my designs were done and I liked them. And I maybe have done this. I had prepared myself for the get in the Uber, grab a sandwich in the hotel, whatever restaurant thing, go upstairs, stay up, working in my whole little hotel room trying to get ready for tomorrow. I got in the Uber, I called a buddy of mine. I was like, hey man, I have a free night. Do you want to go and have dinner? And it was an amazing feeling to be ahead of my day and feeling like I had done good work. And then later, as I learned more about flow states, I was like, oh, I was in a flow state. And Mihai talks about this. He goes, here's the deal. Flow states are characterized by you lose track of time, distractions fall away, like you become sort of one with the work, you often do your breastwork quickly. And at the end of it, you can feel a sense of uplift, a sense of joy, as opposed to a sense of depletion. And I was like, check, check, check, check, check. That was why didn't someone tell me I was in college?

Jay Johnson 27:24

Right. Oh, that's so funny. Well, and and I think about it because so I came, I was uh a long, long, long, long time ago, far, far since retired, I played hockey. And I remember that you know, being in kind of one of those states is not not the practices where it was like the coach was trying to punish you because you had a bad game before. It's like, all right, you're gonna skate mountains the entire time and up and back and up and back until you puke. Not that practice. But I remember so many different times where it'd be like, all right, practice is over. And it's just like, we had two hours.

Steven Puri 28:02

Right, where to go?

Jay Johnson 28:04

I feel like I've been on the ice for like 15 minutes, and it's just like it's all of a sudden you get into the state.

Steven Puri 28:12

Did you know it beforehand or after you're like that's a I didn't at that time.

Jay Johnson 28:15

Yeah, I I learned about I learned about flow states uh quite a while after that, and I've realized that I've had very, very extended flow states, whether it's in uh behavioral science research or anything else like that. And it's just like, huh. But yeah, at that time I had no idea. I was just like, wow, time flies when you're having fun, is you know, what everybody says, right? Um it slows to a crawl when you're absolutely mourning whatever you're doing.

Music And Sound That Trigger Focus

Steven Puri 28:44

Yes, true. And you know, okay, to go back to Mihai, since l let me uh say this. Anything smart that I share in this episode is because Mihai and subsequent researchers have spent their lives figuring this out. And I'm just here to share. Okay, so it's not like I'm smart, I'm just trying to be helpful. So that said, Mihai wrote about okay, so what are the conditions precedent that seem to encourage your brain to drop into a flow state? And is flow state a thing, or is it just kind of a mythical, like, you know, placebo-like effect thing, right? So he said, it seems common among these high performers that they only get into a flow state when they are doing something they think is meaningful, right? It's not like stapling TPS reports or sweeping the floors or something, right? They're doing something where they have skills that apply. I always laugh about there's that great Michael Jordan quote about when I'm in the zone, it's just me and the ball, like everything falls away. It's a great way of just saying, like, if I control this ball, I will do the things that 30 years later kids are gonna watch on a highlight reel, right? It's not really about the stands, it's not really about the scoreboard or even the defenders, it is about control of this ball. The world reduces down to that. He said, so they have to believe it's meaningful, they have to have skills that apply, they have to be operating at a level that's challenging, right? And it is interesting that there are some things that since you know he wrote his original book, uh, different researchers have discovered that help our brains get into this state of being open to flow. A lot of it is around oral AU, oral environment. And I'll tell you to speak briefly about I set up a company to create a flow state website to help people get in, right? One of the foundational things was music. And there's a lot of research around it seems like for most people, the sweet spot is 60 to 90 beats per minute, certain key signatures, you know, non-vocal, you're not singing along with Blackpink or Brittany or whatever, you know, you're the winked show tunes. Um but long melodic passages, like things like that. So happing, you know, I happen to have a bunch of friends who are film composers with time on their hands. So I was like, hey, can you write like a thousand hours of music like this for this flow state app I'm creating? So put that in there. Random thing happens. A buddy who is uh up in Marin, he is a mixer, he does the sound for a lot of the LucasArts, the Star Wars games. He calls me up. He's like, hey man, I just got back from Nepal. I'm like, good for you, great. He's like, yeah, it was my kid's graduation gift from high school because I guess he did really well, got into good college, and you know, Julian was like, Where do you want to go? And he's like, I want to go to Nepal. So he said, While we were there, one day in Kat Endu it rained so hard we didn't leave. It was this lush, warm, delicious rain. And I had some of my recording equipment with me, which I always do. I recorded like two hours of rain because it was so cool. I got back and I'm not really sure what to do with it, but I know you're doing that flu state app. So I was wondering, like, do you want this? And I was like, for free, sure. I mean, why not? So he and I agreed to quietly in all you know the lo-fi playlists and the up tempo and uh in the middle of them, just drop an entry for a playlist that was called Himalayan Dream Rain. No announcement, no nothing, just two hours of rain that loops. It quickly became our third most popular playlist. And I was like, what? Have we all this like scientifically designed, like film composer scored music? So I, you know, I run the platform, so I know people's email addresses. So I emailed some people who were listening to it. I was like, hey man, Jay, will you chat me for five minutes? I'd like to understand I paid all this money for this music, but you listen to rain. Whoa, what's that about? And I'm gonna tell you, if you were to reduce down every person I spoke to, they said a version of it evokes in me a period in the past when I had to study and it was raining out. I was raised by my grandmother in Georgia. At finals, it would always be pouring rain. I'd be inside my family at a Blake House, my dad, and you go down it, and I was like, oh, so wow. So it is again a neural connection you have to this is when I need to focus. So I share all this to say there are some fantastic focus music, you know, services, brain FM, Endell, like there are tons of them, right? They're wonderful. But that was real awakening to me to say, oh, so there are other ways in which you trigger a flow state orally. And after we threw up the the rain one, there is a a blogger in the UK, kind of well known, who's one of her members. She emailed me and said, Hey, I noticed you put up a non-musical playlist. That's the first time I've seen you do that. Can I ask you something? I was like, Absolutely. What? She goes, Well, I had a baby during the pandemic. I used to write my little famous blog at this coffee shop outside London. I can't really go there with the two-year-old now, whatever, you know. I was like, okay. She's like, any chance you would throw up a playlist that was just the sound of being in a coffee shop, because that evokes for me the feeling of like, oh, I'm here writing my cool little single girl blog or whatever, right? And we did. It became popular. I also threw up a bunch of other nature playlists, by the way, like surf and streams. Nice. Nobody listened. I don't know what it's no connection there. It's just like, thank you, Steven. No. So Jan is just saying there are a number of ways in which you can create the conditions precedent for yourself. I need to go deep or for your team to say, hey, let's do that. Um, you know, I've been talking a bunch. Back to you in the studio, Jay.

White Noise Colors And Better Sleep

Jay Johnson 34:26

Well, no, I think that's super fascinating because for me and and like the rain tracks or anything like that. Uh, if I want the best sleep of my night life, it's when it's raining. It's always when it's raining. And it's just that it's that sort of like calm peacefulness that comes from it. Um, you know, I've gotten into I've gotten into the concepts of some of this like green noise and white noise and how that actually has an impact on the brain. So all right. So why don't you share this? Because I think a lot of people still don't still still haven't quite caught up with some of the research on green noise, brown noise, white noise. What is it actually does at like the neurocircuitry level? So yeah, can you jump into that just for me?

Steven Puri 35:14

This is wonderful. Okay. So what Jay uh is talking about at a very high level is everyone I think is familiar with white noise, which is often associated with like there's uh some sort of antenna that's picking up just random background noise. Your TV's not tuned to a station, your radio's not tuned to a station. It's kind of like in the old days, right? Now everyone's sort of on Spotify. But that sense of just like shh, that sort of noise. That then led to some researchers saying, well, actually the way we perceive sound is not even across the entire spectrum, right? We are more sensitive to certain frequencies and they roll off at different ends. What if we were to create different versions of white noise? Like it still sounds kind of like white noise if you're not listening closely, but oh, maybe we will boost the frequencies that we're naturally not attuned to here so that all comes out to be even things like that, right? So this has turned into a cottage industry of having pink noise and brown noise and green noise on stuff, which are all related. And there is some thought, which is very hard to prove, unfortunately, that it does evoke in us a feeling of safety, which we talked about earlier, which gives you more sense of agency, more sense of comfort to do something, because it is akin to in the womb the sound of the mother's blood moving around you in the amniotic fluid and that sort of thing. It's just like that the background shh that's just continuous when you are being baked. It is the first sound you ever hear. So I, as uh Jane knows, but none of you guys know, I have a four-month-old downstairs, and I will tell you that is one of the best things that we got was a tiny little speaker that just generates different kinds of white noise.

Jay Johnson 37:01

Got one too. And I will tell you, I have always been a really good sleeper. I mean, my my time to fall asleep, like I lay my head on the pillow, 15 seconds, I'm out. And when I wake up in the morning, it is like boom. I usually wake up before my alarm. I'm very, very fortunate in this. Um, but within the last several months, uh I had a little stint where my sleep was just destroyed. I have no idea. It was just, it was, I couldn't fall asleep. Like, first time in my entire life, I actually experienced some level of insomnia, um, which is what put me on this pathway of like, okay, when I don't understand something or when something's happening, it's like, dig into the research, find out everything. Like, I'll have a PhD by tomorrow and what so uh I ended up going down the pathway of understanding some of the some of the green noise. And I ended up finding an app and I ended up downloading the app. And I will tell you that after it was it was no joke. It was, it had been probably like five, six nights in a row that I just didn't feel rested, I wasn't getting good sleep. Um, and I used this, and it was just like this this kind of ambient green noise in the background. There was a little bit of hypnosis voice that came in at the beginning of it for roughly, you know, like I don't know, like a minute and a half um of hypnotic voice that kind of came through, and then it was just this 30 minutes of just like green noise, as as they called it immediately. I I don't I don't know that I made like it just triggered me right back into like my normal sleeping patterns. Um I used the seven-day trial and it was great. Uh, and then I didn't actually buy the app. Um I didn't actually buy the email address. Yeah, you know, so I was like, all right, I used the seven day. But I ended up I so it was funny because whatever the trigger was, it came back. And sure enough, I went back into that. I was like, okay, buy the app now. So I bought the app. I don't actually, I don't have to use it every single night. Um, but on the on the rare occasion where either my brain just won't shut off or where I'm experiencing some kind of like high stress, high anxiety state, I click that thing on, and sure enough, it's just lights up. So it's it's been really, really useful from that perspective. How and because I really want to, and and your company, Suka, am I pronouncing that correctly?

Steven Puri 39:32

It means happiness in Sanskrit.

When Flow Matters Most At Work

Jay Johnson 39:35

So it it helps to put people into this flow state. What are some of the and and we know the you know, the Michael Jordan, it's just me and Nepal, we know the uh you know the concept of of what we're talking about. All of a sudden we just kind of find ourselves in the zone. We hear different ways of people framing the flow state. Why do you think why is it so important to you know, whether you're a senior leader and an executive at a company, or whether you're that frontline manager, or whether you're the employee trying to get the job done, why do you think it's important for us as professionals to try to seek um time in this flow state? Like what's the value to me as an individual to get into that state? What's the value to me as a leader of a company to help my people to be able to do that? What's the value proposition?

Steven Puri 40:26

So I have now you know tens of thousands of people have have come into what we do, and I can tell you even friends who are passionate about I want to try what you're building. The pattern is this if ultimately your success, like your contribution to your team, is about leading a team, about interacting with people, being on Zooms, being in board meetings, traveling to conferences, flow states are not really valuable to you because you're gonna spend most of your time building relationships, networking, gathering information, right? Now, if your win, quote, I'm putting air quotes on that for those listening at home, if your win is in knowledge work, I'm going to create something, then flow states are like a turbocharger on your engine. So that is why a lot of our membership engineers writing code, writers, bloggers, copywriters, writers, designers designing, because there is something to, yeah, I could kind of shit out a version of this blog post I need to write. I can kind of like take that app over there and kind of do a mock-up of what the screen should be. But that's not actually the thing that the team does when they go, Oh, I went deep. Actually, I have a new way of doing this. Like if you think about even like dating apps, remember when Tinder came out and it brought the swipe in? The swipe, that that's thought, like that that moved it forward. Like it an LLM would not have predicted a design pattern of a swipe because it hadn't existed before. But after Tinder, it would recommend a swipe to every other designer that's asking to do something, right? So the answer question is flow states are not actually important unless you're doing work where you create something, you need to do knowledge work. And if it is, then it's more important now than ever because the LLMs will do the pattern-matched rote work better, faster, cheaper than you.

Jay Johnson 42:22

Yeah. No, that's that's huge. And and I like the tie back to that because I think a lot of people are worried about exactly what you said earlier. AI is going to take over my job, or I'm not gonna be needed, or I can just do all of these things, but it doesn't do the it doesn't do the creative thinking and it doesn't do the creative design. I mean, yes, it can take your image and design out and say, uh, you know, make Steven look like um, you know, a night, uh, a night templar from the you know, whatever, and sure, it can do that, but you're still giving it the direction and coding. But it if you tell it to do something that's non-existent yet, yeah, it can't do it.

Steven Puri 43:02

And if you're leading a team, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Jay Johnson 43:05

Yeah, no, no, no, no, fair away. If you're leading a team.

Steven Puri 43:07

If you're leading a team, and there's a difference as we've discussed between managing and leading, right? Managing is, hey man, the TPS reports are due Friday at 10, like we all get them in and go to the staff meeting, right?

Leadership That Budgets Deep Work

Jay Johnson 43:18

Come on, let's go. Yeah. Exactly.

Steven Puri 43:21

Okay. The the way I view leadership, and this is not uncommon, but I think it's an important distinction, is if you as a leader say, I have cast my team well, like I have a design team, each person is here because they have a very specific great skill in design or copywriting or you know, coding, whatever. And they have greatness within them. You you have a thesis that there is greatness in each of these people on your team, then your job as a leader is to elicit that, to draw that out of them. The best thing you can go do is give them the tools and the conditions to do that, right? So for example, I'm not gonna name names, but a friend of mine works in an organization where she contributes high-level ideas to the strategy of this corporation. Her immediate superior schedules meetings in such a way that it is very hard during the day to ever have an hour or imagine two hours to go deep. And that's the thing is he expects that they're gonna sit in a staff meeting with 40 people and do the awful stand up thing of like, hey Jay, what are you up to? Well, yesterday I worked on this, tomorrow I'm working on that. Um, not blocked right now. And you go around and do this like these reporting that the Nowhere when what you really want is you want Jay to walk in and go, actually. I went to the beach with my dog yesterday for two hours, and I just walked and I thought about what our competitor launched. And you know, there's a weakness it exposes we should exploit this. They're missing this is really the customer desire. And everyone the meeting kind of like pivots their head and goes, We should leave the meeting and go build that like right now, like out of here and go do that, right? Because that's ultimately which that's how billion-dollar corporations are built. They're not built on, well, I did this yesterday and I'm doing this today, and I'm not blocked. You know, it's like ugh. So you as a leader can create that, but that means you have to then budget time to say, like to get into flow. There's a lot of research. There's a great University of California urvine study that says it takes 20 to 23 minutes from the time you sit down, you sort of block distractions until you'll be in flow. You don't sit down and go, I'm in a flow state, I'm doing great work. It's like your your brain sort of falls into it. And by the way, they have measured in an FMRI how the brain activity changes in a flow state. There was a great study with um jazz musicians, you know, as they go into like a jazz trio, and there's a point in improv where you just become one with the music and one with you know the people in your little trio quartet. And it's interesting, their brain activity actually kind of shuts down on their prefrontal cortex. And if you want to create that in your team, then you can't uh ignore this. You have to say, hey, you know what, even if it's an experiment, to say, what if we were to uh each week set aside two hours where you agree we're not gonna set meetings with clients, we're not gonna bug each other and slack our teams, right? And just go deep and let's try it for two or three weeks and see like, does something come out of that? No one's gonna be punished, as we talked about the safety thing, right? If you don't have the great thought, you're not going to be made fun of, you're not gonna be fired. Uh but what if we just try that? And in that two hours, you think about what in your area of this organization would move us forward. And maybe you design a new feature and mock it up and go, what if we were to build this? Maybe it's you know, you have a an ad you think we should run that you've never had the time to actually mock up before, and you just do that, that's where you get those. Yeah, like you said, nine of these are not things we're gonna do. The tenth one, it's probably a billion dollars.

Jay Johnson 47:00

Yeah. I I don't know. Every time that I have a conversation with you, Steven, it does, it excites me because it's one of those where it's like, all right, yeah, and I I have found that I structure my day. Like, and and I'm the I'm the CEO, but I structure my day. So like my Tuesdays are often strictly either podcasts or conversations and you know, different like exploration sites. It's it's really one of my more creative days. And I find that when I book myself with creative ventures back to back to back to back, that I get myself into sort of like, oh, look at this, look at this. You know, my yeah, yeah, you know, and I have other days that are just these are my design days. These are the days that I'm sitting there and going, how could I deliver this content differently? What did that look like? What would it be like if I were to shift the way that this activity rolls on this activity? And then there's other days that are the okay, I need to answer all of these emails and I need to respond and I need to get these reports done, and so on and so forth. And I will tell you, the days that I have the most joy are my more creative days.

Steven Puri 48:15

Uh I have a question. I'm gonna interrupt you. You have a question.

Jay Johnson 48:18

Yeah, yeah.

Distractions And Building Friction

Steven Puri 48:19

On the days when you want to go deep, what are the distractions that you fight and how do you fight them?

Jay Johnson 48:28

Um so one of them is obviously email. Email is a big distraction.

Steven Puri 48:35

Email on your laptop or on your phone?

Jay Johnson 48:38

Both. Okay. Um but what I will do is I and it's sometimes as simple as I just set the tab down on the laptop and I put the phone over on the other side of the room. It's just I can't reach it. So when I'm in the middle of doing something, and and it's just creating friction to get to those spaces is essentially what I do. And then that kind of keeps me out of it. Uh I am fairly disciplined when I say uh I cut I go to focus pieces, right? Like I can have, you know, I can have a giant bowl of chocolate chip cookies in front of me and still keep myself to only having one because I know that that's what I need to do.

Steven Puri 49:20

That's why you have those big shoulders in the packs because you're like disciplined, Steven.

Jay Johnson 49:24

If it's like, well, if it's nine o'clock at night, let me tell you, then it's it's game on, right? So the longer the day goes, the harder it the harder it is to maintain whatever discipline it is. So if I can create the friction for the things I don't want to do and create the ease of entry for the things I do want to do, I find that I can go longer in that sort of like focus state or in that flow state. Um, so yeah, email would be a big one. And then honestly, um uh I would say that it's my own internal ADHD. Is that when I get into an idea and then all of a sudden I'm just like, oh, squirrel, and I'm like, oh, what about this idea? And then all of a sudden, like my initial focal point has been shifted to something else that's really fascinating and interesting. But to your point, that's where some of my best ideas have come, is when I've allowed myself to sort of like shift into be in between those things, or it's like I go back to the other thing with a different level of energy and a different level of focus.

Steven Puri 50:24

So let me bifurcate that a little bit, which is there is an element of brainstorming, like you're talking about, which is nonlinear. It's like I'm thinking about this for a little bit, then I'm thinking about this, I'm thinking about this, and there's an element of execution where it's like multitasking is your enemy. You said it earlier. Multitasking is simply monotasking, which is what your brain does, and burning extra energy, context switching, right? Yep. So those two things between brainstorming and and executing are require different sort of practices, let's say.

Jay Johnson 51:00

Yeah. So uh those would be my bigger distractions. Um I think that the and I like the way that you contextualize that, because when I am brainstorming, it is it's like, oh, let's go down this pathway, let's check this out, let's look at this. Um, but when it's like, all right, I've got a presentation, I've already done all the brainstorming, I've already done all the research, and now it's just getting into that moment. There's virtually, and I mean, there's virtually nothing that can distract me in that moment because once I get in, it's just like, oh, this, this, this, this. And it's just over and over again. And I do achieve that flow state. And it's funny that you say that at 20 minutes, because there's been points in times where the first 20 minutes has been an absolute like slug-fest slog of like, oh God, I just this doesn't look right. And then all of a sudden it's just you feel it kind of ramp up and it's just like, all right, there we go. All right, we're back. Here it is. Here it is.

Steven Puri 51:57

Do you take breaks when you when you are working on creating in your inflow, do you just work straight through or do you take breaks? How do you do that?

Rethinking Pomodoro For Real Humans

Jay Johnson 52:07

When I'm doing more of execution tasks, I try to give myself a break every 45 minutes. Um when I'm doing some of the design or some of those other things, if I get to a point where it's like, no, I it it's almost like if I've popped out of, but no, like there's been points in times where I've worked straight three hours and just not thought about it. Yeah. And then afterwards I'm like, kind of hungry. Oh, it's because it's been three and a half hours. Right, where the channel is. And I'll go take my break at that point in time. But so like I don't force myself to stay in a state, but if I'm if I'm there and I'm dialed in, I'm just rolling with it.

Steven Puri 52:45

Okay, let me share something because this is something I thought about a bunch in you know designing Suko, which is this guy, Francesco Churillo, a design guy, came up with this concept of there's a cadence that seems to work for him, right? And he used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato, which is why we call it the pomodora technique. But he said, you know, what seems to work is if I work for 25 and then I take a five-minute break, I repeat that cycle a few times and I take a longer break swing, right? So I'll tell you this. Again, starting from best research out there when we were designing Suko, we're like, we should base all this around a pomodora timer, right? It's a very common way of doing that. And I found it didn't exactly work for me. I felt like at 25 minutes, I was in the middle of a thought. It was invariably like, oh, not now. I'm just about to get to the good part, right? So we made it editable, and it turned out to be a big unlock with our members because so many other people felt that way, but they thought there was this like religion around 25 and 5 were written on tablets that he brought down from Mount Sinai or whatever, right? And so what we did was basically we gave you a timer, you can click it with your mouse, type in anything you want. Like I find I worked really well about 50 minutes, like almost meshed together. And little things like that, as you begin to adapt and say, like, okay, the the research is true in the aggregate. Maybe some of it needs to be fine-tuned to me. The same way, like you know, that blogger said, Hey, could I have a coffee shop? Could I listen to a coffee shop? I know it's not traditional, but it helps me. And it's like, know thine self.

Jay Johnson 54:22

Absolutely. So, Steven, this is one of those examples of kind of being in flow and just having a conversation with you.

Steven Puri 54:29

I've realized oh my god, have seven hours gone by? How long have I this dinner?

How To Reach Steven And Try Suko

Jay Johnson 54:34

Well, I think this has been incredibly valuable because when we think about behavior change, when we think about like shifting that shifting the behaviors in in a workplace, we all want higher efficiency. We all want to be more productive, we want our teams to be more productive. And I think a lot of what we've talked about today in sort of moving us towards those flow states or to being able to create the space for innovation and safety for innovation creativity, I think is so important. And I think it's something that's often missed in leadership. So uh, you know, as we sort of round the uh round the basis here, let me ask you if our audience wanted to get in touch with you or if they wanted to learn more about Suka, where would they do so?

Steven Puri 55:13

Oh, I appreciate the question. There are two very simple answers. If there's anything that I've said that someone wants to know more about, it doesn't have to be about my company. It doesn't have to be, hey, you mentioned Cal Newbor, you talked about Francesco Trulo, whatever. My email address is very public. It is Steven S-T-E-V-E-N at the Suka, T-H E S U K J. C O. Email me. I'm not gonna email you back my life story. I don't have time and you don't care, right? But I'll be like, oh, there's a great blog post about Francesco. You read about you know this or the you want to see the University of Irvine study, here's a link, right? So that's available. If someone wants to or wants their team to try getting into Flow State, we made an app that helps people do that. And it's shockingly at the Suka, T-H-E-S-U-K-H-A.co. Um, it's free for three days. Just try it, use it 72 hours straight if you want. Um I just having so many friends who have worked or currently work at one of the Facebook meta companies or at Twitter X, I think it is criminal how much time, energy of the smartest people we have in in design and behavioral economics and psychology go towards creating apps that waste our lives. And if we fundamentally believe that there is some greatness in all of us, maybe it's writing the great American novel, maybe it's creating a new company, maybe it is making the best ad ever, whatever that greatness is. Those companies' business models making sure that you don't do it. Because their model is if you wake up and you're 80 and you're still scrolling and double tapping on the sofa, we win. And I think that's criminal. So yeah, uh do that. Do that for your team. Help them release the greatness and not you know go to the graveyard with the greatness inside them.

Final Takeaways On Greatness And Time

Jay Johnson 57:09

Such a powerful statement. So I I gotta say, it is a pleasure, it was a pleasure the last time, and it is this much of a pleasure this time.

Steven Puri 57:20

We'll just do it a fourth time. It's gonna be awesome.

Jay Johnson 57:22

I'll look forward to it. We'll get in flow again.

Steven Puri 57:24

Well, thank you, Tom. Thank you.

Jay Johnson 57:26

I think we should be in good. Yeah, thank you for taking the time to be here, share that insights, those stories, that knowledge. It's really been helpful. And like I said, I've lost track of time because I'm just like, oh, tell me more. Let's let's dig in more. So but um thank you so much for being here, Steven.

Steven Puri 57:44

It's awesome. Thanks.

Jay Johnson 57:46

And thank you, audience, for tuning into this episode of the Talent Forge, where together we are shaping workforce behaviors.