Flow States: Thriving in an AI World

[00:00:01] You're listening to the HR Mixtape, a podcast for leaders who want to understand people, strengthen culture, and navigate change with clarity. Today's conversation starts now. Joining me today is Steven Puri, founder of the Suca Company. Steven helps people and teams improve focus and well-being through practical tools that reduce stress and burnout.

[00:00:31] Steven, thank you so much for jumping on the podcast with me. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: Absolutely. We started talking about sonar operators. Now we're talking about serious stuff. Ready to go. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: Yeah, it's wild. There's always that pre-recording that I wish I could capture sometime, but we'll leave that for the mystery of our audience to know what we're talking about. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: Exactly.

[00:00:50] Steven Puri, Ph.D.: So I was so fascinated when I came across your profile. You know, you've led teams in film, in TV, and tech. What did all of those different worlds teach you about motivating high performers? Steven Puri, Ph.D.: And I want to start there because I think sometimes when we talk about our employee population and high performers, we just have this assumption of what we should do with them, but they look so different in all those different environments.

[00:01:15] Steven Puri, Ph.D.: Yeah, I appreciate your asking that. And for those listening, and I know you have a fantastic audience, let me just say this. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: Of the many episodes that The Good Doctor has done, the reason to listen to this one is I'm one of the few people you'll meet that has been a senior executive at a couple of motion picture studios, which is considered a very creative field. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: But I've also raised over $20 million of venture and run three startups. One successful exit, two failures. And it's true, you learn more from the failures, right?

[00:01:44] Steven Puri, Ph.D.: So it is from that perspective that we were talking about, you know, what are some of the things happening right now on teams, both as ICs and as people leaders. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: And one of the things that I think would be really germane to talk about right now is a lot of people are thinking, how do I adjust to the changing landscape of AI being introduced in by organization?

[00:02:09] Steven Puri, Ph.D.: And let's be blunt. Most people use AI and they conflate it with LLMs, right? Large language models. So there's still deep learning, machine learning and stuff like that. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: But I think what we're really talking about here is LLMs, how are they reshaping this and how do I retool my team or how do I retool myself to be effective in this world? So I'd love to get into that. But back to you, doctor.

[00:02:32] Dr. Ph.D.: Yeah, no, I do want to get into that. And I'm curious about, let me back up a little bit. I wrote this article a few weeks ago called Foductivity. That was the idea around it. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: Isn't necessarily hitting the business because for a lot of us, we're just real quiet mouses about it. Like we're not telling anybody that we've increased our productivity using tools. It's going to catch up, right?

[00:03:01] Steven Puri, Ph.D.: People are going to start to notice those types of things. And business has got to get more intentional because I'm starting to even hear conversation about, you know, I've got, you know, 30 human FTEs and now I have 30 digital FTEs. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: I have agents that are running on my Mac Mini. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: Yeah. Well, how can we see that changing the landscape right now? Steven Puri, Ph.D.: I know. Well, here's some fundamental thoughts. I'm totally down to argue if you disagree or if not, let's build upon them. Okay, fair enough.

[00:03:31] Steven Puri, Ph.D.: For the delight of the studio audience, they're like, listen to them, go at it. So when you think about the kind of tasks that an organization needs to accomplish, that organization can be you as a solopreneur. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: It can be you as the HR head of a 5,000 person sprawling, you know, but there are basic tasks. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: Now, LLMs, which are forcing this conversation, they're the forcing function right now around productivity. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: They are like Google autocomplete on steroids.

[00:03:59] Steven Puri, Ph.D.: That is what they are. The same way when you were using Gmail a couple years ago and it knew the next character was an S because it's probably a plural you're going to type, you know, that sort of thing was like, I can guess the next character you want and things like that. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: Right? LLMs are saying, oh, I not only know the next character, I know probably the next word and then probably the next thought. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: And this is how you're going to structure it. Why? Because it is a pattern recognition and replication program. Right?

[00:04:25] Steven Puri, Ph.D.: So when it does that well and it replicates the patterns of people that you would read or watch, it has the illusion of thought. It's like, oh my God, this is really doing my job. Well, here's the thing. Steven Puri, Ph.D.: This kind of AI, LLMs, is absolutely fantastic at doing your job if your job is the repetitive execution of tasks that can be very clearly defined. Right?

[00:04:48] Steven Puri, Ph.D.: Hey man, I take the data from this spreadsheet. I multiply them by four and I put them in that spreadsheet. You know, I collate these TPS reports and I file that sort of thing.

[00:04:57] Steven Puri, Ph.D.: You're right. Your job's gone. Okay? Because the LLMs will do it all day long for free, 24 hours a day, no complaints, no PTO, no benefits, no 401Ks you have to have telephone supports for. Okay. So that said, there's this debate about, well, what will humans do? And as you know, in the techno elite, you know, the Elon Musk's and Andreessen's and, you know, of the world,

[00:05:27] Steven Puri, Ph.D.: They in a very condescending way say, well, in the new world, there's basically just going to be us, the owners of these AI platforms and we'll be the tech trillionaires. And then everyone else should stop being white collar workers. They should just go be skilled laborers, go be an electrician. I think you did an episode not that long ago talking about like, go learn a skill, go learn how to be a carpenter. And it's amazing to think about like, wow. So you're basically making this huge bifurcation of like wipe out the middle and you should be a carpenter or

[00:05:56] you should be a tech trillionaire of which those places are claimed right now. Right? So what is the other, if that is one version of the future, one vision, what is the other? It is that a number of the smart AI researchers are saying, you know what, this artificial general intelligence, AGI, like truly human-like thinking, we're not actually on the right path. Like we're pouring money and resources into these pattern replication machines called LLMs.

[00:06:22] I looked at everything on the internet, give me something and I'll tell you the pattern it probably meets, right? What they don't do is they don't push forward the frontier. So here's the end of a long speech. And I know this is a short podcast, but wrapping this one up is if you or your team are going to do the human work that LLMs do not do, it really means saying, how do I go deep on something and create something that is not just a pattern from the past?

[00:06:51] It also means having relationships because LLMs are not great at having relationships, even though they give the illusion of asking everybody like, how are you doing? I'm chat GBT. I'm so excited. It's great to see you, sir. You know, they don't have relationships and they don't move the frontier and that's creativity.

[00:07:08] So that's, as you know, a lot of why I speak very frequently on this idea of like flow states. So how do you go into a deep state where you do the work that moves something forward, not just the repetitious work that an LLM really can do today better than you and longer?

[00:07:23] I love the conversation around flow states. I had a leader once who, who gave me a really very small piece of advice about dealing with the constant interruptions HR gets. And she said, when I get texts, she's like, I don't reply for 10 minutes. And I was like, what? You don't, what? What do you mean you don't reply for 10 minutes? Usually most people have solved their own problem in the 10 minutes that I give them.

[00:07:47] It was just easier for them to ping you because you're responsive and they value your time at approximately 0.1, you know, pennies. And they could have solved it. I totally, um, question for you. I know part of your listenership, they're flow masters. They're like, Oh, I know what a flow state is. There's probably a cohort that's like, I've heard about it. I know it's in the zeitgeist. What is it? Should we define it really quickly?

[00:08:10] Yeah. I would love to hear your definition, but I'll tell you what mine is. My experience is for me, it's, I have two kinds of definitions of flow state. One is the time of day that I am most productive. So that's usually like a 9am to about 12pm central for me. So I don't book any, um, I'm very specific about what gets booked in that time. The other kind of flow state to me is when I can turn everything off. There's no distractions. Yep.

[00:08:39] And I'm just, I'm like the horse with the blinders on, just locked into what I'm doing. Okay. I love both parts of that. I'm going to integrate that into what I'm about to say, which is let's just set the table for 60 seconds. So we all know we're talking about, which is there was a Hungarian American psychologist, this guy, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and he had a thesis. He said, it's strange the way if you talk to high performers in different disciplines, athletes and artists and scientists and inventors.

[00:09:08] About the concentrated states where they do the thing that makes them famous. The thing we know them for, even though they're in different disciplines, like wildly different disciplines, they talk about this state in a very similar ways. He's like, there's something to that. Right? Right. So he did the research, did the interviews, did the thing at the end of it, wrote a book. That book is called flow. It's the seminal work on this. It's why we call it a flow state. And he's, I think he said the greatest thing. He was like, I chose this word flow.

[00:09:35] Even though you talk to Michael Jordan, he talks about being in the zone. You talk to, you read Einstein, read Picasso, they have their words for it. He said, I chose flow because it was the most beautiful metaphor for what I found.

[00:09:48] 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. You go further and faster. And he said, that is what these high performers have figured out how to do and how to do it repeatedly.

[00:10:08] And that laid the foundation for, as you know, a lot of smart people since to dedicate their lives to understanding what are the conditions precedent that help you get into flow? What are the, you know, if you read near and Cal Newport and Kotler and, you know, they're like some amazing minds. So anything smart that I say on this pod, let's just attribute it to one of the people who have spent years researching this. I'm just bringing the water to this conversation.

[00:10:32] I love it. And we'll make sure to put that link to that book in the show notes. I always love it when our guests talk about books. All right, let's marry those two ideas. Okay. So you brought up something very important, if I'm interrupting you for a sec, which is Mihai in his, you know, statement of there's this flow state. He said, let me tell you the characteristics of it. He said, you lose track of time. You're not staring at the clock. You lose yourself in the work. Like you become one with the work.

[00:11:01] You generally do your best work fast as you think possible. And at the end of it, the distractions that have fallen away so you can do great work. You leave yourself actually feeling uplifted or a sense of joy, even as opposed to depletion. Like, oh, I got, I got that done. Right. And that's a kind of cool thing. And now since then, like there was a great University of California, Irvine study where they wanted to understand, like, how do, as your friend said, how do interruptions affect your flow state?

[00:11:31] Right. And it takes about 20 to 23 minutes to drop into a flow state. You don't just snap your fingers and be like, I'm in flow now. Like, I'm at warp speed and, you know, starjack or whatever. So when it takes the 20 to 23 minutes to get into this state, your distractions fall away. Time falls away. You're doing great work quickly. Right.

[00:11:51] If you get interrupted, it takes you another 20 to 23 to get back in. So your practice of blocking out time, I will tell you right now, if you try and book time with me, you have my link. Like, you can't book between nine and noon because that I know is my highest clarity time. And I don't do client meetings. I don't do podcasts. I don't do internal meetings with my team.

[00:12:12] Like that is, I'm going to do in this three hours what would take me six hours if I did it in the afternoon and evening. And that is, again, some of the research done is understanding what time of day are your chronotype. You know, is it true for that? You know, and how you can limit those distractions like your friend said. Yeah. All right. So let's marry these two things now.

[00:12:37] I definitely am the kind of person who can get into the, I'm going to sit down with my computer and I'm going to explore Claude today. And I'm just going to, so Claude is another AI model for those who aren't familiar, like that GPT, just for reference. It can do, they all can do a ton. We're just talking the very most basic level here, but I can get lost in the like figuring things out, but there's actually no productivity coming out of me during that time.

[00:13:03] So how do we think about those two things, the tools that we have now with AI and the curiosity and inquisitiveness and kind of the time suck hole that you can get into trying to learn a new tool? Okay. Fantastic question, because as it's been sort of codified how this flow state works, one of the conditions precedent is that you need to have a goal.

[00:13:29] You have to clearly define task that you need to accomplish and you have to have skills that apply toward that task. And I think there's a funny quote he had about Michael Jordan may say, I think Michael Jordan's quote is, when I'm in the zone, it's just me and the ball. And it's a great way to say distractions fall away. My entire world is reduced down to controlling this basketball. And if I do that, I'll do things that 30 years later, people are still showing on highlight reels, right?

[00:13:55] Just performing. But he's like, it's not Jordan painting. It's not Picasso playing, you know, basketball, right? Okay. So it has to be something where you are, you have skills that apply and you're doing it at a level of challenging. So an exploration of cloud code or cloud co-work may be a hard task to get into flow because you're sort of figuring out what is my task here? Like, it's a very nebulous thing. I'm just like, let me explore this and see what it's like here. As opposed to, hey, I need to write a great blog post you were just talking about a moment ago.

[00:14:25] I need to go write a great blog post. It's along these lines. I have mad blogging skills. I'm going to time box this. I'm going to give myself 45 minutes and do it. As you know, the community that I run, the Suka community is like a flow state app. Most of our members are writers, designers, and engineers, developers, because they have very clearly defined tasks that they can accomplish if they focus.

[00:14:49] Yeah, that's fascinating. How have you, as you were looking at designing your company and this app to help people get there, I'm curious, how do you see, how do you see this helping roles potentially that aren't knowledge workers, right? So you have other roles that, basketball, I think is such a good example. That's not a knowledge worker role, right? But there's still the ability to get into that flow state.

[00:15:15] How do we start bringing that conversation up more so that people understand that some of the things we talk about, I feel like just fit in this very knowledge worker, remote, hybrid environment, only available to you? Okay, well, I don't want to oversell flow states because they are magical. I remember the first time, I'll tell you a very short story. I didn't know the concept of flow state when I first experienced one, but in hindsight, that was it. I was flying from Austin, Texas, where I am now, to San Francisco.

[00:15:43] And the next day, I was going to meet with my team. And I thought, you know what? On the flight, I want to mock up with my hacky Figma skills. I want to mock up this feature idea. And then I'll pitch to everyone tomorrow. If there's enthusiasm, I'll let the designers finish it, right? So got on the flight. Alaska runs that nonstop. And captain's like, sorry, kids, Wi-Fi is out. See you at SFO, you know? And I was like, okay, fine. We took off. I started working. About 15, 20 minutes later, we started descending.

[00:16:12] I thought, oh, okay, so we're probably in Dallas. Like something's wrong with the aircraft and they're going to land, swap it out and say, oh, the hydraulics are bad. Look down, two hours and 40 minutes had gone by. And I had no con, I couldn't tell you if the drink cart had come by. I couldn't tell you the name of the guy in the seat next to me. But my designs were done. And when I got off the flight, I had prepared myself. Maybe you've done this for getting the Uber, grab a sandwich at the hotel lobby,

[00:16:41] go up to the room, try and finish this before I pass out in the hotel room and get ready for the meeting, right? I got in the Uber. I called a buddy of mine at SF. I was like, I have a free night at SF. Do you want to go have dinner? And it felt amazing to be ahead of my day for a change instead of chasing my day. And so that sense of what you asked me about, you know, knowledge work, blah, blah. Yes, there are amazing artists that talk about being in the thralls of the muses singing to them all night.

[00:17:08] And then Picasso has a great quote about, hey, I stayed up all night for like 14 nights where it was. And I forgot to pee and I don't think I ate. But Guernica, hey, do you like it? And it's true. You can get into that state. But I specifically, in building Suka, was aiming at my own problem, which is I am a knowledge worker. I sit here. In many ways, even though I'm a founder of the company, I'm an IC. And I have to create blogs for our blog. I have to write code for our thing. Design things, you know.

[00:17:37] And it's great for that. And I'll tell you this. A bunch of my friends who are founders, C-suite executives, tell me, I'm so distracted. I could use your app. Oh my God. I'm so glad you built this. It is useless for them. If you spend your day in meetings, on Zooms, Google Meets, Teams, you are not going to be in flow. You're just going to be playing like verbal tennis all day long. It's exhausting. And I wish I could help you. I can't.

[00:18:04] What we have done is really, it bubbles up usually like this. I will get an incoming email from someone who's like an engineering manager or some sort of leader people who says some version of, hey man, like four of my guys use your tool. And I'm trying to understand how this helps more people in my organization. Like, should I get a site license? Can I buy 20 seats? That sort of thing. Because he or she has heard about it from four of their engineers or four of the designers or something.

[00:18:34] And what I counsel them is, I'm like, here's the deal. Now, if you set up your team's schedule so that you have client meetings sporadically during the day, you have stand-ups where it's like, well, Sherry, this is what I did yesterday. This is what I'm doing today. And I'm not blocked. How about you? You know, like if you're doing something long, no one on your team is going to get into flow. You may have everyone turn in their TPS reports on time because you have a daily stupid meeting about doing your TPS report. You know what I mean? Like you may do that.

[00:19:02] But has any company, has any billion-dollar company won because the TPS reports are on time? No. The billion-dollar companies come from someone saying, you know, yesterday, I actually took two hours and I stared out the window. I thought deeply about that new feature our competitor launched. And there is a flaw in what they're doing. And I think if we move quickly, we could exploit this and launch this. And then everyone in the meeting goes, oh, my God, you hear what Simpson said?

[00:19:31] Like we should leave the meeting now and build that now. And that comes from flow state. That comes from deep thought. That doesn't come from like, yeah, in between my Zoom meetings, I had this great idea. You know what I mean? And that's really what I try and encourage. Like I'm not here to help people who just need to be in board meetings and talking to investors. Like that is not something you're going to optimize the flow state. So anyway.

[00:19:55] Man, that was such a good comment in naming reality as to when something's going to work and when something's not going to work. I love that. I cannot believe we are almost at time here. We have talked about so many different wild, exciting. We did all in English, all in color, as promised. All over the board. I guess I'll leave you with this to answer. As you think about the audience, right?

[00:20:20] So this is, you know, HR and business leaders who are navigating the complexities of hybrid, you know, fully remote, fully on-site employees and the rise of AI in everything that they're supposed to be doing. What's your one piece of advice for them as they go forward? I love your asking that. And I will say this. Fundamentally, the problem that most HR leaders have, and by HR leaders, I mean leaders of people.

[00:20:49] You can define yourself as a chief people officer in HR, engineering lead. If you are a leader of people and you've approached me in the past year or two, I'll tell you, almost everything comes down to, did you hire well? Because I will tell you this. The people who are very intentional about, this is our culture and this is our mission, and you have to be aligned with both of these before we let you in the door.

[00:21:13] They have the greatest success at saying, okay, because I think you are great at this job, you want to cure cancer just like we do. You want to make robots to help paraplegics just like we do. You want to create, you know, electric batteries or whatever it is, right? And you want to treat each other this way, treat our competitors, our collaborators this way. If you hire well, then when you say to someone, you know what, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I want you to take two hours, block out your calendar. Don't talk to anyone.

[00:21:43] I will not book a meeting with you. We'll do no client meetings. But I want you to go deep and find those ideas that turn us into a billion-dollar company. That all starts with hiring because you have to trust those people. And some of those conversations end up with the other person I'm talking to saying, wow, I need to rethink a couple people on my team. Yeah, for sure. Oh, I love that. And that helps to define better that concept around, and I'm using air quotes, culture fit, right? I've talked to this before on the podcast.

[00:22:12] For those playing at home, that was air quotes. Yeah. There's nothing worse than a manager who comes out of an interview and they go, yeah, I could totally see getting a beer with that person. It's like that's not the job description. Right. It depends where you work. That might be true. That might be true. You get the most amazing restaurant manager. Right. Everyone's having a beer with them. Right. Stephen, this was amazing. I'm so glad we got to sit down. Thanks for taking a few times to chat with me. This was helpful for people. Yeah, this was awesome.

[00:22:41] If somebody wants to learn more about your company, how do they do that? Easiest thing. There's anything I've said where they want to go deeper. It does not have to be about my company. My email address is public. It's Stephen, S-T-E-V-E-N, at thesuka, T-H-E-S-U-K-H-A dot C-O. Suka means happiness in Sanskrit, by the way. I will happily send you back a blog post, more to read from Cal Newport, whatever it is that will help you, right? And if you do want to try flow states or incorporate into your organization, obviously the website is thesuka, T-H-E-S-U-K-H-A dot C-O.

[00:23:11] It's free for three days. Use it all you want. If you get into a flow state and it's magical, drop it on the group chat and say, what's up? I heard you on HR Mixtape. I love it. Thanks again. Thanks for tuning in to the HR Mixtape. Like, share, review, and subscribe to support the show and help more people discover these conversations. Until next time, keep the conversation going.