- So when I wake up in the morning, for instance, like many people, I don't feel immediately alert. I don't feel like I could just dive into writing if writing is the most important thing I need to do that day or I have some transition time. Do you think that people should embrace natural transition times on the timescale of a day or that they should train themselves to like, you know, bounce into effort, like go with the flow or force oneself through the door?

- Well, how I relate to that personally, I've spent a lot of time thinking about day architecture. Well, I call it day architecture. And I think there's some very systematic things we can do, but I think like anything, they should be individualized, right? I don't think that everyone should follow a certain model 'cause we're all very different.

You know that old book that, Tim actually produced the audio book, "Daily Rituals"? - Oh yeah. - Like one of the best things about "Daily Rituals" is how few patterns there are through them. It's just hilarious. - I love that book. I'll put a link to it. - It's so brilliant.

- Such a good book. - It breaks down the daily routine. It's like two to three to four page chapters on like a hundred some brilliant artists and scientists and creators. And they're just so random how they live. - Some are out partying all night. Drugs, alcohol, caffeine. Others are super regimented and monk-like.

It's the range of daily architectures is so vast. - So I think we need to have like that awareness and that sense of humor and humility about it. And we can get systematic and structured at the same time. I think it's important to hold both of those. I mean, what you just asked, I do believe that that beautiful period when we first wake up and that dream state is so powerful.

And I think that people, almost all people immediately pick up their phone and start checking messages, which just shuts down one's awareness of what's been happening beneath the surface all night. So I think that that's a real lost opportunity. I remember when I was 11 years old, I read this, my dad actually gave me this Hemingway essay on his creative process.

And there's one of my favorite, sometimes there's like an insanely potent book that's put together. And it's, two that come to mind are "Lessons of History," which is this short compilation of Will and Ariel Durant, two of the greatest historians who've published tens of thousands of pages. This is a short compilation of a handful of thematic essays.

It's only like 100 pages of all their life's work boiled down to a few themes. It's unbelievably potent. And "Hemingway on Writing" is another book of that nature, which takes all of Hemingway's from his books, from his letters, private letters, from his articles and essays and notebooks, like everything he's written about the creative process and boils it into this like short book on his principles of creativity, just unbelievable.

But before that book came out, I read this piece, the short thing he'd written about the creative process, which was essentially, he'd always leave a sentence unwritten. He'd end his workday with a sentence like half written. So leaving with a sense of direction. And then he would let it go.

You know, he would go out drinking, he would do all the things that Hemingway did. And then he returned to it first thing in the morning and that like unwritten sentence has become a paragraph and a page in his mind and it would be a way to hit the ground running.

And that's what really spurred me to start creating this process in my chess life of always ending my chess study with something left, like posing my unconscious a question, like studying the complexity and then releasing it, which later became, and then tapping into it first thing in the morning, pre-input, which later became my MIQ process.

And then I developed team-wide MIQ processes. The teams that I work with all have versions of the MIQ that they utilize as individuals, but then as teams. And it's an amazing way to develop a shared consciousness in a team, to have everybody be able to tap into the question that's top of mind for every member of their team or for a leader to be able to be aware of what is the most important question for every one of my scientists or my analysts or anything.

It's a really powerful way to cultivate shared consciousness. And it becomes our game tape. Because if we're tracking our MIQs, let's say I'm studying something for three weeks or for four weeks. And what do I think is most, if I'm tracking the questions that I think are most critical for that thing and I'm deepening my analysis of it, what I arrive at, what I think in day one will be very different from the MIQ in day 14.

And then we can study the gap. And then we can study the patterns of the gap, the gaps. And this is what I call MIQ gap analysis. So if I'm setting a chess position, like if I play a chess game against you and it's incredibly complex, and I don't quite understand this position, and then I do a deep, deep analysis of it, what I'll arrive at after 14 or 16 or 18 hours of study will be different from what I felt during the game.

Now, what's interesting is, this is a cool thing about chess study. If my understanding was here during the chess game, after like a few hours, I might be like really far away from that. But after I've completed the study, I'll usually be like very similar, but deeper. So it's often like deeper, like closer than where you were after a few hours of study, but it's like a deeper level in.

But what's the gap between that and that, between where I was in the game and what are the patterns in the gaps? And then if you think about those patterns in the gaps through those lenses of the technical, the thematic, and the psychological, right? We deconstruct it in that way.

Then that becomes our game tape, right? One of the hardest things for mental athletes is to actually have game tape the way basketball players do, or foilers do, or fighters do, where you can see the actual game tape. We need to create our mental game tape. So this is a way that I, it both enhances the creative process and creates the game tape for the training process.

And then studying the gap analysis we do reveals what we need to focus our deliberate practice on. - This difference between physical endeavors and cognitive endeavors, I think is so key. Nowadays, most people are involved in cognitive endeavors, and there's so much, it's basically like being in a glass house with windows everywhere.

I mean, social media, texting, windows, internet connection on the computer. There's just so many points of entry and where one can become distracted. Whereas if you paddle out to ocean, sure, you could bring your phone perhaps, but you're limited by the environment and the need for safety of the number of things that you can think about.

- Funny, I wore an Apple watch training a little bit on the ocean, and it was good for me 'cause I wanted to align my intuition on speed with what actually it was showing, and it was good to calibrate myself. But man, I took it off. It's so much better being on the ocean without technology.

- Yeah. - Like being liberated from it. Tracking, yeah. - I'm learning to turn stuff off while I work. I mean, I have had to learn to just fight things back because when I started in science, I mean, I didn't have a smartphone. I didn't have any of that.

And yet one really has to fight nowadays for their freedom from these interruptions. So it's something that people really have to cultivate. So in terms of the structure of that day, you pose a question for the day, like the most important question, would it be like, let's say, like I'm working on a revision of this book that I delayed release on 'cause I wanted to add a bunch of things to it.

So would one say, you know, the most important question is, you know, how do I finish this book today? Or is there, I'm guessing it's more conceptual than that. - I think that you can, I mean, it's a tool that one can utilize tactically or strategically, right? So it can be like, if you're in creative flow, just leaving yourself with a sense of direction, or it can actually be zooming out and thinking about like, what is the highest order question that I'm grappling with, right?

But I think it's like one wants to stretch for the, if one is doing the latter, the higher order strategic thinking, it's like, you can think of like, one is stretching for the question that matters most with the same kind of intellectual or cognitive intensity that one is experiencing, for example, pushing yourself from like 168 to 176 in cardiovascular interval training, right?

Like you're really stretching mentally. So you need to be at your stretch point. Growth comes at the point of resistance, right? So we, like, but intellectually, we're not used to really feeling when we're at our stretch point. So we're thinking about a question, but that's a question, what's the higher order question?

What's the higher order question? What's the question that really matters? And one way to frame it is like, our mind, if we're good at something, slices like a knife through butter through most things, but then there's a place we're stuck. Like those stuck points are the MIQs. Those stuck points are like, right?

Like we don't need to wait, we don't need, like the mind will just get there, like, oh, but that's the thing. And then we explore there, like what, how do, that stretch within that stuck point. - And that's usually where people, including myself, pivot away. I'm thinking outside of the work domain now.

Like, like, ah, like I don't want to think about, like it's when we tend to, I noticed that there's an infinite amount of distraction available nowadays, if we want it. And, you know, audio books and podcasts, and I think podcasts are wonderful, but you know, they can be a source of distraction from the critical question we need to be asking, or they can be a source of answers for perhaps the critical questions we're asking.

But there's just so, there's so many of these opportunities to just look away from something that is like a, it's like a emotional infection. It's different than an infection in your skin that's nagging 'cause you can feel it there. And you want to get that thing out, right? Very primal instinct, like get that thing out, get the infection out.

This is like an emotional infection that you can just kind of not see if you choose to turn away. But those are the things that really get you over time. - That's why we do our cold water training. Like that's where we like, we train at living on the other side of pain, of enjoying it.

Like that place, that place that like itches, like ah, bounce away from that, but that's where you need to sit, right? But we can practice that thematically, like loving that discomfort, wanting it, hunting for it, like finding the place where we're stuck, and then letting it sit, and then not bouncing away from it, but just releasing it and returning to it.

And we have insights, right? 'Cause often in those moments, like where we have our insights are, like when we wake up in the morning, are in those stuck points. And I find it's very interesting. I'm sure you've done this, like I've done like hundreds of diagnostics with people on my teams, like where do they have most of their creative breakthroughs?

And so many of them are in the shower. It's really interesting. I think a big part of that is like the full body somatic immersion moves them out of conscious thinking, into like, 'cause their mind is experiencing, and then the release of the conscious mind allows the unconscious to run.

And then they tap into it. - First thing in the morning is when I get my insights or understanding, or when the truth hits me square in the face. Well, like there's no avoiding. I wake up, I think about like, "Okay, that's the thing I got to deal with." And I tend to write it down right away, try not to write it down on my phone.

I think having a point of capture that doesn't offer any other distractions, that's why I'm a big believer in pen and paper. - I 100% agree with you. And like, so first of all, I agree. First thing in the morning, that's the juice. And the whole MIQ process is geared toward harnessing that, like tapping into that, right?

Like feeding the mind. 'Cause that just happened to me so many dozens of times, where I would just have the insight in the morning, but then I realized, I should be finding the areas of stuckness and feeding it to myself to have the insight about. So it's like directing that creative process.

But then if we open up our phones, like if the moment we start to see emails without reading them or see anything, we're unconsciously solving for what's in the emails. - Yeah, it's all stimulus response. You're going into stimulus. So if people can start to think about being reflective versus in stimulus response, I think that's sort of like the widest binning of all this.

I have to say the shower. I've talked about this thing about why people have insights in the shower with my friend. I'd love to introduce you to him at some point. We've been friends since we were seven years old. My friend, Dr. Eddie Chang, he's a neurosurgeon and the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF.

And he studies speech and language. And he's taken people with locked-in syndrome and developed AI algorithms so that they can speak through a screen with their face moving in real time by decoding human speech or human speech cortex. And a truly brilliant individual. He's been on this podcast, he'll come back again.

Ask him about the shower thing. 'Cause he used to work on neuroplasticity of the auditory system. We think, we wonder if it's the kind of white noise of the shower as well. - Yeah. - Because Eddie's done beautiful work showing that it's the signal to noise in the auditory system that defines whether or not a certain pattern of speech or auditory cue gets remembered.

So when you have this in the background, let's just put this in the terms that we've been referring to this up until now. The thoughts that surface above that noise have a big sharp peak relative to the background. So it's the signal to noise. Whereas certainly the opposite would be when you're on your phone and you're scrolling through and you're looking at all the thoughts and feelings and stuff of other people.

So how do you capture your own thoughts in terms of which are, and filter them through what's meaningful and what's not meaningful is I think actually a really important question to begin with. And white noise background with very deprived, you know, visual stimulation, most showers aren't that interesting. It's white noise, blank walls, a few things that are familiar to you.

So they basically disappear from your visual field. And the idea is that thoughts then can, that are constantly geysering up through your unconscious mind can be captured because everything else is noise. Perhaps this is a hypothesis. And maybe I'll put you and Eddie together sometime and just be an observer.

- Yeah, I'd love that. That's powerful. - So, I mean, that's how we learn language. It's the error signals against the background noise. It's all, that's just how you fix stutter. It's a, you create background noise. You increase noise to which actually elevates signal in the auditory system, oddly, in any case.

- So you found that four and a half hours was the sweet spot of a focused work, but for some people, it might be an hour. They might need to train up that level of focus. - Well, and if it's four and a half hours, it's not like that's like a lot, the rest of the day is feeding into like those being brilliant, right?

So if it's four and a half hours of creative output time, then there are other periods where one can do, have inputs that feed it, right? I think that's very good for people to have an awareness of what their energy, like what their peaks and valleys are of their energy throughout the day, and then align their peak creativity work with their peak energy periods.

I think it's really important to not be in a constantly reactive state. One of the things I find fascinating is how people will have meetings scheduled everywhere, and then fit their thinking between meetings, and how liberating it is for them when they actually now block out their time for creative output time, right?

Like it might be color-coded in their calendar, and then have meetings fit around there. So their day is driven by their self-expression as opposed to by a constant set of reactivity, and just more, and more, and more, and more, right? I think harnessing the undulation of stress and recovery throughout the day is hugely important.

I think having workouts throughout the day, even micro-workouts during the day, meditation periods during the work day, everything being quality over quantity, right? We can get so much more done. And if you think about it, like, I mean, you talk about like elite performing competitive teams. It's all about, like if you saw how much video analysis and time that the Boston Celtics coaching staff puts into what ends up being like a 35-second clip that's shown to a player or the team, like it's so much work to then the most potent thing, right?

It's like when you're an elite, because like the players are doing something so intense, right, like it's all about quality, not quantity. They're not training basketball 17 hours a day. They could not possibly play then. Or they're training brilliantly for like, you know, maybe an hour and a half a day, brilliantly, but like scientifically, right?

Or if they're playing for a two and a half to three hour game, right? Then what's the way to optimize for that? You don't stack six hours of training in before three hour game, no. So much of it is, you know, body work and setting some tape and then being primed in the right way to remember what you're looking at on tape and then taking breaks and returning to it.

And then you're like understanding exactly how much load is on your body and your mind and having your sleep right and your nutrition right and getting everything optimized and then being a peak performer when it's on, right? But we don't have that discipline as mental beings very often, but we should in our creative process, in our relationships, right?

In the art of being a mom or a dad or a husband or a wife or a friend, like why wouldn't we be cultivating ourselves and being brilliant at that? Like I really believe in quality as a way of life. That's another very important principle for me. That we're either practicing sloppiness or we're practicing quality.

If we do something shitty, then we're practicing shitty. And that will, just how like we can harness the thematic interconnectedness on the positive side, we can also really harness it brilliantly on the negative side. Every time we practice being sloppiness, we're using thematic interconnectedness to be sloppy in everything.

I really believe that. So quality as a way of life is a beautiful way to practice quality everywhere 'cause it will manifest everywhere, right? Not in a way that's like robotic or constrictive. No, in a way that's self-expressive and beautiful. - Living one's life like a work of art.

- Yes, beautiful. Amen. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)