From Hollywood to Tech: Navigating Career Transitions with Intention with Steven Puri, Founder and CEO of The Sukha Company

Steven Puri shares his journey from Hollywood exec to tech founder, revealing how failure, focus, and flow states power reinvention. In this episode we discuss: 

• How transferable skills led him from Die Hard to startups
• Why failure is a critical part of reinvention
• How to create intentional, productive workdays
• The surprising story behind naming his company, Sukha

Show Guest

Steven Puri is the Founder and CEO of The Sukha Company, a focus and productivity app designed to support a healthier work life. A former newscaster, software engineer, and Hollywood executive behind Independence Day, Die Hard, and Star Trek, Steven blends creative vision with tech innovation to help people do their best work. Check out the Sukha app and get 20% off for life with the code REFRESH20

Show Notes:

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Career Strategy and Focus
• 2:00 Steven's Unconventional Career Journey
• 5:49 Valuable Lessons from Career Failures
• 14:18 The Power of Capturing Learning Moments
• 21:14 Creating The Suka Company
• 28:35 The Science of Flow States
• 35:40 Creativity and Focus Techniques
• 40:13 Episode Closing and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey everyone, this is Jill Griffin, the host of the Career Refresh podcast, and I am really glad you're here today because I have a treat for you the Career Refresh. We are going to talk about career strategy, navigating your career, reinventing your career and transferable skills today All things that everyone is talking about. So this might be a good time to grab a pen or get that notes app ready, because my guest is going to be sharing his experience and I know a lot of it will be actionable for you. Stephen Puri is the founder and CEO of the Suka Company, and its mission is to help millions of people find their focus, achieve more and to have a healthy work life, and I know we all want that. So with that, I welcome Steven.

Speaker 2: 0:47

Oh boy, this is going to be a good one.

Speaker 1: 0:50

Of course. All right, friend, take us through a little bit more detail about your bio on a high level, cause I know everyone's going to want to hear more about what you're doing.

Speaker 2: 1:00

Okay, here's the fun reason to listen to this episode for those who are in their car or at home or at the gym is I have an unconventional path that relates to things Jill has talked about in the past, which is I started out in my teens as a code monkey. Both parents were engineers so I knew how to code. I am going to school in Los Angeles and while I was there a lot of friends were in cinema TV because it's Los Angeles. I was there, a lot of friends were in cinema TV because it's Los Angeles. So I was there when film went digital and I happened to be, luckily, at that intersection where I could talk to an engineer, I could talk to a creative, and I ended up producing digital effects for a bunch of movies, like the computer generated effects movies when that was a relatively new thing.

Speaker 2: 1:42

So we won the Academy Award for the visual effects on Independence Day which I produced. The digital effects Worked with Cameron, finn Schur, woody Allen, spielberg, a whole bunch of people, val Gibson. We did Braveheart like a ton of stuff, super fun, and that led me to want to make a big career transition then into producing films, not just being a tech sort of engineering guy, but actually being a studio executive.

Speaker 1: 2:05

I mean, it's such an amazing story to hear how you've continually used your transferable skills. So again, I want everyone to be listening for that, but continue.

Speaker 2: 2:15

Sorry to interrupt, Let us just say lucky things have fallen in my lap and I think what I've done is just trying to make a lot of them. It's like recognizing luck and then going, okay, how do I work hard and make this something? So when I decided to make that transition to being a studio executive, learned a different set of skills, different lexicon, different network, built that and then ended up a few years later executive vice president at DreamWorks for Kurtzman Orsi, who were the writers of Transformers and Star Trek and a bunch of fantastic guys, and Vice President Fox, where I ran the Die Hard franchise, the Wolverine franchise, a bunch of the action movies there. As you can tell, it did a lot of action summer movies. And then I had a moment where I was like I'm not sure when I wake up, be like 40, 50, 60 years old, being the guy making Die Hard 9, where you're like, hey, kids, daddy's going to make Die Hard 9 to pay for your college.

Speaker 2: 3:07

So I went back to the thing that I knew and I transitioned my career again into engineering, into tech. I was like you know what? Let me find some problems that I can solve that I think I'm suited to solve that. Have tech solutions and let's go build some startups. So in my career I've both done the film thing. I've also raised about $21 million of venture capital. I've had one successful exit, which was awesome, and two failures which were painful but instructive, and I'm happy to talk about all of that. I've really come to a place in my life where there are some things that I've learned through these different experiences about how to be intentional and mindful in your work and navigate this, and that here we go, yeah okay.

Speaker 1: 3:47

So you've talked a lot about using those transferable skills. You didn't use that word, that was the word I use. And then moving into the next thing and there's been a lot of talk about that s curve and whether it's disruption of business or innovation of business or innovation or reinvention of yourself, it is an S curve and for anyone, if you just picture the letter S, there's the start, which is hard and like you need to get that flywheel moving and you're like really stretching to get it moving. Then you're in that middle, which might be bumpy but you're scaling and you're starting to get momentum. And then you get to mastery.

Speaker 1: 4:20

And if you're like many of us, when you get to mastery it feels good for a while. But when you start to find yourself not necessarily learning things anymore or you're not in a meeting where your palms are sweaty and you're excited anymore because you're in mastery, you start. Most of us then start to figure out we might be in the same job, we might be in the same title, we might not be moving house in any way, but then we find how do we start the bottom of our S curve again? What do we need to learn? But your career, I think is really interesting, because you started with technology and engineering, took it to other places and then I'm guessing, when you started to feel that level of mastery is when you went back to say now how do I take everything I've learned and bring it back through engineering and technology? Do I have that right, or is it-?

Speaker 2: 5:04

You have that right. I'll add one little bit of color to that, which is it was no kidding, die Hard 5, there was a thing that just convinced me like my film career was over, where, when I was at DreamWorks for four years, it's the last studio run by a filmmaker and when I was there it was Steven and Stacey running it. It was definitely a sense of go home tonight and make your projects 1% better. Working at Fox, which is News Corp, the style really comes from the top. The style comes from Rupert and Chase. At the time it was more go home tonight and see if you can make your projects 1% cheaper.

Speaker 2: 5:40

When we got to a point on Die Hard 5 where I was like the heart of why you make this movie is gone, I was like this is a business and I give great credit to my boss, the chairman, with whom I did not get along, but I was like he does not treat this as show art, it's called show business and he very proudly, you know mashed together the Alien and Predator franchises. It was like I was the guy who thought of Alien versus Predator franchises. It was like I was the guy who thought of Alien versus Predator. Okay, that is for him an accolade. For me it would be like am I going to look back on my deathbed and go man, I did some great genre mashups.

Speaker 2: 6:12

Remember we took like pirates and dancing and made that pirate dancing movie. That was brilliant, right, and that for me was really impetus of like what am I doing with my life? Because, as you know, when you get wealthy, you just no amount of money can buy more time. It's one thing you can have the best food, you can have the best massage, you got the best vacation but you can't buy more time. And I was like I am now wasting my time here making like a diehard movie that doesn't deserve to be made, and I'll make a diehard six if I stay and it doesn't deserve to be made.

Speaker 1: 6:45

Right. So really interesting and introspective. So it was wanting to make something 1% better creatively versus 1% cheaper, right? That's what I'm hearing you say. And then the second thing you mentioned. Well, so I think it's also just to call out you had been working long enough at a particular salary, long enough that you also had the privilege then to be able to say let me pause and look at this differently, or how do I want to contribute?

Speaker 2: 7:16

privileges of fantastic word and I'm very grateful that you know I have had a lot of luck in my life and also worked very hard. Where I am not wrestling with, where does the next meal come from, right? Right, yeah, and the parents both wrestled with that. I would say that drives me. My parents worked very hard to make sure I would not understand what their life was like when they were young.

Speaker 1: 7:36

Yeah, that's beautiful. And again, I say that not I mean no one, like I said, no one handed you anything you worked for. But I say that just for somebody who might be listening to this and say, but I don't have six months savings to be able to restart or rethink. So I want to keep that perspective as we go through this and see how we can?

Speaker 2: 7:54

I did not early in my career. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I had multiple roommates to make it work, and there's a lot of fun stories that come out of that New York City apartment with a studio apartment and there's still a wall down the center. I had a roommate just after USC in Hollywood and our apartment manager. One day we found out she was a stripper by night. We're like this seems like yeah, this is that building where our manager's also a stripper.

Speaker 1: 8:22

Yeah, making coin, there you go Okay.

Speaker 2: 8:25

Making cash man, yeah, making coin.

Speaker 1: 8:26

There you go, okay, so, in addition to knowing that you had the savings, so there was risk reputationally, there was risk for your own intellect and your own innovation and probably your own feeling of self-worth, and those are real things that are gonna show up in a career. What else did you think about in order to say how do I take this and bring it back into technology?

Speaker 2: 8:48

Okay, this is a great story of a stupid mistake that I made and hopefully I've learned from right. So I mentioned to you I had one successful exit. So in my twenties I got along very well when we did Independence Day with the director and producer of the movie, right? So there I am, like 24, 25 years old, and we decided to start a company together to do visual effects. Raised $15 million, which is not incredibly hard when your film just won an Academy Award for visual effects, right? So we did that Exited a couple of years later Daswerk, a big German conglomerate good, analog here would be like Liberty Media.

Speaker 2: 9:25

They bought us out and, as one thinks, in their 20s gosh, I'm really smart, I'm really good at this, I've sold a company, I'm invincible, I'm good looking All the stupid things you think when you're in your 20s, right? So then when I made the decision to leave Fox which is mutual with my boss, even though they kept me there an extra year just to run out my contract I was like we both know I'm leaving after this contract when I went and said, oh well, what's the other thing? I know how to do. Well, I know engineering. Let me go see how I can apply that in this new world of startups, which has become very popular by the 2010s.

Speaker 2: 10:02

My first company failed right, and some of the things that were painful and failures, the way I captured them is when I reached the moment of I have to go back to my investors, who invested about 3.1 million into this right and have the shameful conversation. I use that reference to your Brene Brown recent episode right, but the picture I painted of what we're going to build. We are not going to get there. We've tried everything I can think of, and raising more money would be in bad faith because there's not something new to try. It's a blue didn't get there right. We got to about 60,000 monthly actives. We need hundreds of thousands to raise a series of right, so we're going to pull the plug rather than go forward and waste more money. Horrible conversation, maybe because everyone I knew in film was watching.

Speaker 2: 10:50

You left a job as a senior executive at a motion picture studio. There are like 30 of those jobs on earth. You left one to go do this startup thing right, and this is now over 10 years ago when it wasn't quite as cool as it is now and I just felt like I would go to the dry cleaners and I bumped into someone who was like how's your company going? I'm like I'm going to shut it down. I failed, right, it was awful, but I did capture that. I did sit in a chair at my house with a pad of paper and I wrote down while the wounds are bleeding. What did I learn? Not a year later, when you're like oh, it wasn't that bad and life goes on. No, right now, when I feel like an abject failure. What are the things I would tell myself two years ago? Do you recall?

Speaker 1: 11:23

any of those things to share with them.

Speaker 2: 11:25

No, Are you kidding? I have a piece of paper right here. Those are gold. This is my Bible. I think we repeat our mistakes unless we are very intentional, and a lot of what I wanted to share with you today is about intention and mindfulness and how to get the most out of your day right. But to bring this to a conclusion, the number one thing on that piece of paper was listen, and it was a very, very powerful thought for me about how how close am I to the people with the problem that I'm solving, that I'm listening to them, not projecting onto them what I think they want. Right, and that has guided me to success with my current company. But, man, I had a painful lesson there and, like you said, there was a lot of. I can't believe I was a studio executive and now I have a failed company and I feel like a failure. You know and also learned, as we discussed, people don't think about you as much as you think they think about you, so it's like it's sort of passed with time.

Speaker 1: 12:21

You know, yeah, but it's, but it still sings and it still sings it absolutely still sings.

Speaker 1: 12:27

So I think for any of our longtime listeners, you know I always say with frequency to evaluate yourself. I have evaluated myself every Friday afternoon for about 25 years what worked this week, what didn't work this week, what would I do, definitely next week? And that is based on my performance and client meetings, my pitching, my sales, my everything I'm doing. I'm looking at and closest to the experience that you can do, that which is what you said. You sat down and you did it the closest to the experience out of a big presentation and you feel really shaky. But it's important to capture equally what worked and what didn't work, because we do have a negative bias and our brain is, if we don't feel that great, our brain is going to go to all the reasons why something didn't work. But there was also some successes, I have to imagine, in that, even though it ultimately was a failure, if you think today was there a success that you can share that you would reapply and scale with.

Speaker 2: 13:31

Oh sure, there is no way I would understand the modern world of angel and venture institutional investing if I hadn't done that startup out of Fox right. So, yes, I define it as a failure, because I raise money from people with the vision of we're going to build these pyramids. Ultimately, we did not build the pyramids. We got the money for right. But along the way a lot of people came and worked for me, went on and launched their careers and are now successful in tech.

Speaker 2: 13:57

I personally have taken those lessons to launch my current company. The things that I saw there really became the foundation of the super company. I was like, oh man, the thing we get to solve is helping people really use their day well. And those were all wins that came from that. But what I meant is I've noticed that over time you start to have those rose colored glasses and if you really want to capture the lessons, you can't wait six months or a year to say, like, what did I do? It's like capture them now. And I keep those two sheets of paper with my two failed companies because I know I have a predilection. I have some predisposition to make those mistakes. Unless I correct it, I'm going to. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 14:38

I think the other thing you said about having two failed companies is important for people to realize that we often hear about or publicize the success, whether that's the bio, the LinkedIn profile, the networking we're doing. I mean I say all the time I fail more than I succeed, because I try something new every single time or every single day. I'm always trying. My successes are huge. There's a lot of failure and, like I will say with honesty, at you know, my mid twenties or my early thirties, failure was shame, failure was oh my God. But now I'm just sort of like, come at me, bro, like next next, exactly it's like okay.

Speaker 1: 15:23

I tried, I tried.

Speaker 2: 15:25

Michael Jordan has a great, great quote which I am going to mangle, but he's like no one ever talks about the 27 times I had a game winning shot and I missed it.

Speaker 1: 15:35

You know, I was like he did amazing things, but there were a lot of shots he missed Right, and I think also you know I'm speaking from a US American culture, so I would love to hear from listeners as this applies in your cultures globally. So I would love to hear from listeners as this applies in your cultures globally. But in school, as we're growing up, failure is being held behind, is repeating, is maybe discipline or punishing, and we're in a system where failure is not ever looked at differently and then we carry that lens all through our schooling. Then we get out into our first jobs and the same thing again I get it, someone's got a, you know, money and, uh, an effort involved. So failure can also mean those things. But it's when you understand.

Speaker 1: 16:20

I think what silicon valley and the tech companies have taught us is that how do we, like you're saying, look at, yeah, it was a failure, we're not going to gloss over it.

Speaker 1: 16:33

There's still learning here that can be applied, and I know my years working with Microsoft in a strategy and innovation role. They first taught me about what they call the wallow and I was like, well, that just sounds depressing. What's the wallow? And after every launch and I don't mean, I mean every launch, whether it's, like you know, 1.0, 1.2 or 2.1, right, like every single launch, they have a wallow and they sit in there and they have a very systematic way of looking at success, failure and learnings and I was like, oh, this is a step change, like this is a new way of just also appreciating that like people still need to be motivated, they need to feel the morale, they need to feel like, yeah, okay, we didn't win, but there's good here and it's not just all failure, and I think that that's something that if people can take away even anybody who's a parent in the, in the learning of your children- I mean, you do not know, Jill, I'm going to become a dad in November.

Speaker 1: 17:36

I didn't know that. Congratulations.

Speaker 2: 17:39

And you just touched on something that, lauren, I talk about, which is when our child will have failures. When they do that, the thing I want to train myself to ask, like you said, is well, what did you learn? Not, you know, like, oh God, you got to do better next time. It's not that feeling of like, oh, I'm down on you, you should be depressed. It's rather the thing of like, oh, what a great opportunity. What did you learn today? Yeah, yeah, and just make that the thing. It's just, oh, this is a great learning Cool.

Speaker 1: 18:09

Yeah, and, for full disclosure, I am child free. However, I have multiple children around me, and plenty. I'm a godmother to many, and I was talking with a dear friend of mine whose son is very successful in sports and is going division one at the college level shortly very successful in sports and is going division one at the college level shortly and it was just sharing how, every time in a particular game, whenever they failed, the coach would have them on the sidelines during the game doing pushups. I'm like, oh okay, so let's burn their energy out more, love the public and caning for them, and do you think that's going to motivate them anymore? And then I was like you know what? Then I started designing in my head a picture of who this individual was, and guess what? I was right, but I think it's interesting takeaways around failure. All right, I want to get back to you though, but I still think it's a really important.

Speaker 2: 19:12

Okay, let's get back to me. This feels great. Go on.

Speaker 1: 19:16

Let's talk about what you're doing now. You've mentioned a couple of times about being intentional, how to be productive in your day, so talk about the SUGA company. I'd love for you to tell us why the name. Dig a little bit into what you're doing.

Speaker 2: 19:30

Okay. So let me start from problems that I have, because if anyone is again driving around home and raise their hand going, yeah, I get that. Maybe this is a more interesting way to talk about it, which is, I realized that I and a lot of people I work with as I was doing these companies that were you can call them remote distributed hybrid, you know, but it's not. We're all sitting here under fluorescent lights five days a week, eight hours a day, kind of copy right. So it's, you need to bring your own kind of like structure and discipline to do something and stuff can sprawl, right. I found that what needed to get done today could have taken eight or 10 hours, could also have taken four. Ooh, okay.

Speaker 2: 20:08

And then you know, you go and you read the books because a lot of smart people have written about this. So when you read Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian-American, we can talk about flow states. When you read James Clear and Cal Newport, whom I got to meet, and Near, whom I got to meet these guys, and there is a great commonality between what they talk about and write. And let me be super blunt, there's so much commonality between what they talk about and write, and let me be super blunt, there's so much commonality that, yes, they may have different lexicons and different acronyms with things, mnemonics to have you remember stuff but they really agree upon the core five or six principles of how to manage your day and not have your day get away from you. And that became super interesting to me. So when you talk about how did I bring value from what I call my failures, this was one of the biggest things where I was like wow, we could have been more efficient, I could have been happier in my day if I'd done these things. How do you make one button that does them right?

Speaker 2: 21:03

So, problem one I call it my cold start problem, which is in the morning tomorrow, 9 am, I'm going to get started on X, y, z, which I have to get done right, but I would find myself tomorrow morning at like 9.15, still kind of returning emails from my inbox, going through the news or something to be informed or whatever, right. So 9.30,. I got rolling and I was like that's a problem, let's peel back the onion, okay. Layer one is, let's call it what it is I'm procrastinating. Okay. Layer two why? In my case, overwhelmed, and I was like okay why am I?

Speaker 2: 21:34

overwhelmed and it came down to two things it was I looked at my task list and it was long. I was like there's 17 things on here. I'm not going to get them all done. I don't even know where to begin. It's so overwhelming looking at the number of things, or something on the list was so wrong as a task so big, it's like I'm not going to write my book between now and my 11 am podcast with Jill. Why get started? That's a 14-day, three-month thing and I wrote right. So that's a goal, that's not a task.

Speaker 2: 22:04

So, with that problem, which turns into the end of day frustration, where I would lie to myself, you know what I'm just going to get up early tomorrow and before 9 am I'll finish the stuff from today and then at 9, I'll start tomorrow's work. It's a lie, it's just dominoes through the week and I would find myself reinforcing this thing of like God, I'm not good at managing my time, I'm not going to get, and I hated that and every now and then I'd have a win day and be like this feels great. Okay, what are the conditions precedent that made that a win day? So it's simple stuff. For example and I'm talking now about Suka, the platform I built.

Speaker 2: 22:41

In the morning my smart assistant looks at my task list with me and just says let's choose three things, steven, what are the three priorities? And then when I work, the other 14 are hidden away. I can't see them and it suddenly reduces for my ADD, medically diagnosed. I don't mean that in a colloquial way, but like I do have ADD, like I believe I can multitask, I believe I can get more things done than I can right, it really reduced the overwhelm. Well, I look up, I'm like, oh man, I can get those three done. Since we did that on our platform, our members have a 77% better chance of finishing three things than finishing two. Simply by hiding the stuff, you don't get overwhelmed. That's how powerful that thing was for other people, not just me. Which metrics?

Speaker 1: 23:23

are how I know that.

Speaker 2: 23:25

The other thing is, if it sees something stupid big, it's like Stephen, you're not going to write your book this morning. My smart assistant's like how about outline chapter three, because I see in your task list you finished chapters one and two. Outline. Like you can do that in half an hour. Let me throw it in as one of your three things this morning and it just makes it more achievable. And you know how it is. It's that positive reinforcement. We were like horseman a little bit, like I got my three things done. I'm good at this. I'm excited to do it tomorrow morning. And you asked me about how I named my company. I met laura, my wife, in yoga. Right, I married the girl on the yoga mat to my left not kidding, that is a literal expression, right. So yoga is a part of our daily life which she's obviously struggling with now with her belly but you know we're doing prenatal yoga for her On our honeymoon.

Speaker 2: 24:10

A couple of years ago we had a working title for this thing. We're building, right the flow state app to help people get into flow. Let's talk to the Lord. We're going to Bali, which is a great place when you do yoga. Spend 10 days just hanging out with your new wife, right. So on the way there I said to her you know what I want to find? The name I want to find like wait, amazon's a great name, but it doesn't really say like bookstore number four. You know, like Nike doesn't really say like shoe store, but you remember them. I want to find that mail app. And Laura, of course, was like I wish that for you. I hope your unconscious mind bubbles that up or the universe helps you find that thing over the next few days. So that thing over the next few days. So we got there. I said I think someone help is do you mind today if I have a quick Zoom with like maybe two or three people that are members of our community and just ask them what's their favorite thing? Maybe that'll be good seeds that'll bloom over the next week or two, right? So she's like I'm going to the pool, enjoy. I'll see you at dinner. I know so I did.

Speaker 2: 25:05

I spoke to three people, asked the usual questions like hey, I just asked for 10 minutes. What's your favorite feature? Why do you use it? Great. The third guy when I was going to the wrap up, like Jill, thank you so much for your time. It's eight minutes in. I'm going to let you go now. He said, steven, you asked the wrong questions. And I was like, okay, guy, that I don't know that well, thank you for that. What was the question I should have asked? He said you should have asked me why I pay you. And I was like, okay, I mean, it's 30 cents a day, it's not like a birkin bag every month you know like why do you pay me?

Speaker 2: 25:40

he's like I found I have two kinds of days at three o'clock I could be playing with my kids they're two and four or at six o'clock I'd be down on myself. I'm like where did the day go? I'd pay you because my kids are not between four forever okay okay, wow, so I go to dinner with laura.

Speaker 2: 26:02

I was like I spoke to this dude today. He's more articulate about what I'm doing than I am and this is what he said. She's like that's really good. So that night we're going to bed brushing our teeth. She looks at me, she goes. You know what? You wanted the universe to speak to you. It spoke to you through that guy. You know, in yoga we hear prana and karma and dharma and all these like sanskrit concepts. He described sukkah to you. He described that feeling of the self-fulfillment you feel, the happiness you feel when you're in your lane doing the thing you're good at. There's your name and I bought that domain from bed that night on my phone when I looked up the happiness company, the super company, and I just bought the super, kind of like that's what I'm going to call it.

Speaker 2: 26:43

Awesome.

Speaker 1: 26:44

It's a lovely story, yeah, Of how, of how also. I think what I would take away from it too is okay, you were in a place that was beautiful and you could pause and rest. But I think what I always take away with it is that when we find ways whether it's through hobby or other activities that are not core to our work and we can find the pause in our day and maybe it's an hour, maybe it's a walk in a park or on the beach or someplace where you can get away A lot of times you can get into that flow state because you let your brain just wander in a way.

Speaker 2: 27:17

Can I tell you a story about exactly what you said. So when I was a young punk, right 20 years old, working at this ad agency in Hollywood, one of my first transition jobs into entertainment my job at the time was for the agency which did trailers, so studios, warner Brothers, buena Vista, which was Disney. They would send us rough cuts of movies. This is coming out this summer, it's coming out this fall. Help us with the trailer, right? My job was get them in in, assign them to a writer, producer to write the trailer and would send the draft back to the studio, right, run by these two guys who are like 20 years older than I had been doing this for ages, very well respected in the industry, right, great promo guys.

Speaker 2: 27:58

One of them, jeff, comes to my office and he said to me uh, he was calling stevie, I don't know why he's like Stevie. I was like, yeah, he's like you know Bart. I was like there's a guy in the vault who delivers tapes named Bart. I've met him in the elevator. I think, yeah, he goes. You ever get Bart of a trailer, right? I was like Bart, the guy who delivers the tapes. Right, are we talking about the same part?

Speaker 1: 28:21

He's like yeah.

Speaker 2: 28:22

I'm like I haven't. Jeff, where are you going with this? He's like I'm an instinct. Give him something. Okay, You're the name on the door. You've been doing this for 20 years. I'm on a question. Got it Done? Jeff comes to my office two days later. How's Bart doing? I was like Jeff. I gave him his first movie. I gave him a rough cut from some beam title at Warner Brothers. That's like a month deadline. I was like I gave him that thing two nights ago. I haven't bugged him yet. I don't want to blow his brain out. Okay, steve, that's good. So what else did you give him? It's like he's never written a trailer before. I gave him one trailer. He goes. Steve, let me teach you something about creativity.

Speaker 2: 28:57

It's always about the other thing he's like listen, if you give Bart one thing to work on, he's going to stare at that thing with little beads of sweat coming down his temples and he's going to come up with the most obvious B version of a trailer you have ever seen in your life. Because the part of your brain that does the oh huh chocolate peanut butter what are those really together?

Speaker 2: 29:19

That's not the part you think you're thinking with, so you have to give him another movie to work on. That's not the part you think you're thinking with, so you have to give them another movie to work on. Can I tell you in my film and tech careers how right I've seen Jeff Groovin for decades. What you just said. There's actually a great book about the neuroscience called the Net and the Butterfly, which is about the default mode and the executive mode network, which is why so many people, including hello, yours truly, right here. Oh, I had this great idea when I was showering this morning, driving, going for a walk, doing the dishes because your executive mode network is executing some action that you think you're focused on washing the dishes, while the back of your mind, like the baby brain, gets to go oh, I don't know what's the cell phone taste like? Tastes, like you know, and that's incredibly cool. That was a great insight that has carried me through so many fun successes, also with writers in Hollywood.

Speaker 1: 30:10

I was going to say, I mean, if anyone is writing, whether personally, or has a dream of writing, Stephen King on writing and I'll also put in a plug yes, the written word, but the audio book. He actually is the voice, the narrator in the audio book and it's such a fabulous, fabulous book on writing and it is, it's really important. I have a client right now who has made a decision because of her lifestyle and things that she needs, that she's getting up at 4am and she is writing for two hours every morning before conversation, children, social media, news, right, she's creating a sacred and it gives her time that then she goes out about her does, knows all the things she needs to achieve, but that quiet time is really important to like. Let the flow happen.

Speaker 2: 31:00

I got another one for you, ron Bass, who wrote, you know, rain man, my Best Friend's Wedding, all these movies, right? This ties into the concept of chronotype, which you've seen a lot of smart people write about, right? So Ron Bass was an attorney who decided he wanted to be a screenwriter and he was famous for this thing which you just brought up. In the morning he told his family listen, I can't talk to you about whether we're having pancakes. Did you do your homework? I can't talk to you, wouldn't talk to his wife. He would get up, go to his office and write for three or four hours. Because he said, what I realized is I can't hear my characters in my head once I start talking with you.

Speaker 1: 31:42

It's really.

Speaker 1: 31:42

I mean, I didn't hear it. I hadn't heard that before, but I have a similar thing where, again, you know, there's two of us and a dog in the house. There's no children, but often, as my husband's prepping for his day and I'm prepping for my day, we each might have one earbud in. That's the way that we say, like one earbud so you can listen to whatever it is that you need to, and I might be listening to very low-key meditative music as I'm starting what I need to do so that I get into my prime state to then start writing and creating that is cool that you use sound that way, because I'll tell you, it's one of the things that I learned in research, which is, it is true, for flow states which we can talk about if that's interesting for your audience.

Speaker 2: 32:25

But to get into that flow state, there is a lot of research on what sort of the most probable music is that will get you there, which is about 60 to 90 beats per minute, certain signatures, melodic, rhythmic, non-vocal music. I happen to have a lot of friends who are film composers with time on their hands so they bring like a thousand hours with the platform. Super interesting. Yes, we all have the friend who gets in their flow state listening to nineties gangster rap or death metal.

Speaker 1: 32:53

They're the outlier. I mean, I definitely listened to some Eminem and got into my flow state Okay, so I'm just saying there is that.

Speaker 2: 33:01

But there is that middle of the road thing, so there are many, obviously, flavors of that. There's like the whole lo-fi genre. We have three playlists. Playlists are just lo-fi. We've got, you know, upbeat, down tempo, a lot of kind of things like that. And here's a realization I had, again, just again, listen, one of the things I'm really trying to do as I say this as I'm talking, which is so ironic. I say this as I'm talking, which is so ironic. We had a number of people in the community say you know what I always associate being focused with, like being at this lake or being by this body of water, whatever. Can you provide me that? Coincidentally, one of our sound engineers was in Kathmandu and came back and said, oh my God, it rained while I was there and it just sounded so delicious. I recorded two hours of rain in the Himalayas. So we're like you know what, let's create a playlist and see if anyone likes it. It was just Himalayan dream rain.

Speaker 2: 33:50

I called it right, it was a huge hit Now sounds of Emerald Lake in Canada, we have a stream in Japan. If you want to hear a gurgling brook, we have Cypress surf, if you like, hearing the surf hit the beach. And it's interesting how, for some people, that kind of like rhythm thing is even better than listening to what we call traditionally music music of nature, you would call it.

Speaker 1: 34:13

I mean. For me, words can distract me, so sound is better.

Speaker 2: 34:19

for me Are you listening to Eminem right now? Be honest for me.

Speaker 1: 34:27

So I'm listening to Eminem right now, be honest. But but I also have um. I have a playlist that I call pump and it's something that I often give to clients of just music that is with words and is. I don't know what the beats per minute is, but it is words that are sort of like your psych song. Like you got into this you've got a presentation, you've got a job interview, You've got a big, important meeting, right, and how do you get into state that way, which often involves physically moving? I don't necessarily mean exercise, but like stand up and listen versus sitting down, and if you're standing, that's it. It's your state of where you're physically at. So tell a little bit more about what this app does and, if anyone's interested, like who's it? For?

Speaker 2: 35:09

I know it's about focus, but tell us a little bit more about that I'll tell you to be super blunt and I don't market it this way is it's a flow state app and let me take like 30 seconds and talk about flow states. For anyone who doesn't know, this is for you. For those who already know, you can just nod your head and be like I feel smart, right? So Hungarian-American psychologist who's now I mentioned, mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, had a thesis. He's like high performers seem to get into these states of concentration where they do great work, they do it efficiently, the world falls away. I want to study that.

Speaker 2: 35:46

He is ultimately, the person who named this. His seminal book is called Flow and what he said was this he said I have looked at athletes who do this. I have looked at artists, I've looked at inventors. It is amazing how there's so much commonality about how their minds and their spirits are sort of trained to be like. Now's the moment where I do the thing right and they call it different things.

Speaker 2: 36:05

I always love that Michael Jordan quote where he calls it the zone. He's like when I'm in the zone, it's me and the ball and just the scoreboard falls away. The defenders don't exist, the stands aren't there, it's just. You see him in that moment where he's doing incredible things. It's just me and the ball.

Speaker 2: 36:19

And there's a Picasso quote about I was up all night, I forgot to pee, I didn't drink or have dinner. I think I lost track of time. But hey, gernika, like what do you think? Do you like it? And that he was like, how do I make that accessible to people? And a lot of what I'm trying to do is say, okay, how do I take the learnings of you know of behind and and others, and make them accessible to people, really available? So he said you know what? There are things that they do. There's a kind of task that seems to get people in a flow where you have to have some skills that apply toward it. So it's not Michael Jordan painting, it's not Picasso playing basketball, right, they're not going to get into flow state, right. So you have to have skills to apply. You'd be somewhat challenged, like it's not stapling TPS reports, even if that's your job at work, like kind of A right.

Speaker 2: 37:06

So you have to have some ability that applies to it, you have to be somewhat challenged, you have to believe it's meaningful. And then there are those tricks that we offer, just like how do you time box things, how do you apply music sometimes to help you get there. So I say all that to set the table. What I firmly believe is, if you want to have that three o'clock, I feel great, I knock this out and I play with my kids or go windsurfing. Whatever you want to do, you can get there if you're intentional. Which brings us back to the very beginning of when you and I first met, right, and we talked about this for the episode, which is we made an app that, if you have an intention, it's simply a website. You just literally open the superco, the super company, and when you hit play, it can put your computer in. You know, do not disturb. If you open a website that's like YouTube, cnn, you know, whatever.

Speaker 2: 37:59

There's a smart assistant that'll nudge you. Jill, do you really need to be in CNN right now? Is that how, being a tool done? There's a smart assistant that will nudge you. Jill, do you really need to be in CNN right now? Is that how you get your work done. It's amazing the way, once you just have that opportunity to say who do I want to be, you know, I want to be the guy or girl at 3 pm and stuff I don't really need to be in CNN right now. Right, there's beautiful music, there's time boxing, there's all those kind of things and community people. So that's really what I do is say how we bring people together to do the things you're capable of, because I have a thesis we all have something great inside. The question of this lifetime is are you going to get it out or not?

Speaker 1: 38:33

Yeah, I love that. I love that, isn't it? I mean, I think it was Elizabeth Gilbert who made it more widely known. But any of us that have studied any of the ancient literature, it of the ancient literature, it's the idea that it's already in there and we just have to carve it away. And how do we bring it? Like whether it's scolangelo, right, they believe me. I have an uncle who's an expert with a whittler and yeah, I mean, his creations are amazing. Um, but same thing where he'll? He kind of sees the wood and knows what's in there and then release it.

Speaker 2: 39:07

I love that. That's really cool, Steven.

Speaker 1: 39:09

This has been such a treat, I think, having just a conversation around what you're doing and intention and flow, and also the transferable skills, a lot of people a possibility. You don't all have to have the answer now. Again, remember that S curve. You're in something, you're in the start of getting it going. Sometimes it feels hard and you're like what am I doing? So starting and getting into the flow state and giving yourself carved out time and, whether you're using an app like Steven or you're using it just within yourself, finding that time to pause and let yourself do two things at once, which might be, yes, I have a job, but I'm also walking right now, or I'm giving myself time. I think all of that is really, really helpful.

Speaker 1: 39:53

I want to hear from all of you. If you have questions, we will bring Steven back. We will dig deeper. Whatever you want to hear more about flow states, we will bring him back. Send any of your questions to hello at jillgriffincoachingcom and until next time, I'm going to tell you to embrace the flow, be intentional and always, always, always, be kind. Thanks, Stephen. I really appreciate you being here.

Speaker 2: 40:14

Thank you guys.