There is a world of difference between the top 3 percent and top 2 percent of high performers in the world. This week Erik Antonson shares how being in a state of flow helps you identify small changes you can make to raise your performance and master your skills over time. Listen in as we discuss getting into a state of flow, why we default to our level of training, and how to break through fatigue in order to achieve that next level of progress.
Erik Antonson has spent the last 10 years on a deep dive into learning deliberate practice and flow through exploring the themes on the Progression Project podcast and applying them in the water from paddle surfing. He’s a two-time national Costa Rican champion and now foil surfing.
You can connect with Erik via Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.progression.project/
Episode Transcript
He’s a two-time national Costa Rican champion and now foil surfing. Now to give you an idea of the level of people that he interviews in addition to some of the world’s best surfers, foilers and paddle surfers, he’s had Josh Waitzkin as well as Anders Eriksson on as guests. And if you mentioned the word peak performance, if you are not mentioning these two men,
01:30
that have created incredible books like Peak and the Art of Learning. Do yourself a favor right now, since you’re listening to a podcast, go subscribe to the progression project podcast, go listen to those two, and then you’re going to be hooked on everything else that Eric brings to bear when he talks to these people. Eric, thank you so much for being here today. I’m looking forward to this. I’ve been looking forward to this for actually some time. So thank you for taking the time. I know you get a lot going on. Yeah. Thanks for having me. It’s be fun. No, this is going to be incredible. So.
01:56
We’re going to be talking about P Performance and we’re going to get into that because a lot of people are really wanting to learn about that. But I want you to kind of give us an idea. There’s a lot of people that will get into something like playing the guitar or surfing or even golf and they’re enthusiastic about it initially or they just want to have a certain level of expertise. Tim Ferriss talks about getting to like the 80 percentile pretty quickly. But what you talk about and what you’ve been diving into is not that 80 percentile. You’re talking about the last, the very top 1%.
02:25
very top 0.5%. And this is what we’re really going to get into today because there’s a world of difference between even the top 3% and the top 2% and the top 2% and the top 1%. So that’s what I’m excited about talking about today. And thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show. There was a part that we were talking about before we got started. I was going to ask you about flow and flow you say is too broad of a term.
02:52
people think about it. Can you kind of give us an idea of what you’re talking about with flow? Because people hear the term all the time and surfing martial arts, et cetera, but they may not know exactly what it is. So if you want to study flow, Mihaly, Chiksa Mihaly, I think that’s how you pronounce his name. I think his book called flow is a great place to start. And then you also have Steven Kotler, who is currently doing a dive on flow. And I didn’t even know what flow was until a few years ago, but I’ve
03:20
built a life around it since I was probably 12 or 13 years old. Probably when I was seven or eight, I got a go-kart. And that feeling of just, it was fast. My dad and I built one together. And it was a feeling that I have been chasing now since that age. And so when I started reading about Flow, there were parts of it that really jumped out and resonated with me. And then there were other parts that I didn’t understand where they’re coming from. This is something I really haven’t articulated before. So this might be a little bit rough for you,
03:51
The term is broad. If you look at in Japanese, there’s 11 words for love. And I feel like flow is very similar. The difference in writing or doing a podcast right now, some people would say that this is a flow state. You get really deeply lost in conversation or music if playing privately at home is gonna be a very different state than what Kai Lenny or Jamie Mitchell is feeling when they’re dropping into a 60 foot jaws wave.
04:18
And the way that I look at it is that, do you want to get deep on this now? We can go anywhere you want, my friend. Let’s just go with it. So I feel like we build routines to handle life. And older we become, the less you actually interact with your outside world, the way that it truly exists. Basically you’re walking through whatever your manifestation of your house is or your drive to work. You can drive for…
04:45
an hour sometimes and not even know how you got there. It’s because you’re on autopilot. And so I look at flow as the stripping away of autopilot and the aperture to which that is opened is dependent on the situation that you’re in. So playing music, maybe you’re really tapped into playing music, but that aperture probably isn’t very big yet. But then you start adding layers of consequence flow multipliers as I think Kotler refers to them. And that aperture begins to open up. And so.
05:14
There should be different ways to explain flow. And I don’t have those. I haven’t spent enough time thinking about how you should describe the different levels of flow, but it’s something that people really don’t talk about. And I think that’s an interesting point of those experiences. And like you said, sometimes it sounds ambiguous where it sounds kind of mumbo jumbo, we’re kind of Zen and people like to play within those blind spots of that ambiguity because now they don’t have to be specific, but what you’re talking about again, in martial arts, for example, if I’m just sort of asleep at the wheel,
05:44
Maybe I can find things in jujitsu or in martial arts, fighting, punching, whatever, but I’m going to have a better chance to get to this area of success or victory, or at least not being hurt if I can have a specific direction I want to go with. So whether that be that idea of deliberate practice or a deliberate endpoint, that allows me to kind of get to that as opposed to just sort of, because what you’re describing to me sounds almost like when we sort of default back to our level of training.
06:11
we’re in the middle of it and we’re experiencing it, but we’re, I don’t want to say we’re reacting, but it has a different intention. And I think I’m saying the same thing. You are. I can’t say it very eloquently, but am I on the right track? You are. We do default to your level of training. I’ve worked with a few SEALs and some JTF2 folks, Canada special forces, and it’s been very interesting to have conversations with them around training because they exist. And so
06:39
you exist in a world that is very high consequence. And so training really matters. And I don’t think that people understand how, one of the ways that I assess skills in the water, if I’m coaching in the water, and it’s one of the things that I do is surf coach, as you increase the level of consequence, you can watch what new skills are stripped away in those levels. And…
07:03
That is a very good way to ascertain where someone is in their ability to learn. And you start to understand how quickly someone’s able to integrate a new skill and actually default back to that practice. And we all strip away at some point, you put me out in a 60 foot wave and I’d probably flail around and drowned, right? You put me in a 20 foot wave. I’m pretty good. And so we all have that level. And a part of what I do in seeing where folks are at is putting people under stress and then looking at what holds.
07:33
And then reverting back to situations of less stress and working on the weak points until those become habitual. And then you can go and stress test again and see what shakes out. And that’s what you were talking about when you were interviewing Anders Ericsson. When you were saying that you would do like these 15 minute mini sessions, as opposed to like two or three hours where this person now they’ve put this bad habit sort of into this place. Now you’re able to look at it after 15 minutes, look at the video, show them, correct them, and now you’ve.
08:02
basically compress that amount of time where they’re learning these skillsets. And that’s more about deliberate practice though, shortening the episodes of deliberate practice is very important because feedback loop and figuring out the ideal feedback loop for whatever you’re training in, depending on what you’re training in. Maybe it’s a short window. If you’re working on a baseball swing, 15 minutes could be a lot of swings. You might want to look at it every four or five swings. If you’re trying to tweak something in your swing in surfing 15, 20 minutes is generally a few waves.
08:31
a good timeframe. And that’s the thing too, because at your level of coaching, you can see quickly what they’re doing incorrectly. And it doesn’t mean that we have to go through and over-coach this person, but you find those one or two things that they’re doing that are really detrimental or that are going to really inhibit them in the future. You correct that. And now that allows you to kind of take these layers of learning for them. And I love the way you talked about it, because I think the same way with martial arts, are you familiar with the Tabata protocol? It’s like a sprinting protocol with 20 seconds on 10 seconds off. I didn’t think
09:01
I had an athlete of martial arts, he was MMA fighter. He had a fight coming up in three months. And the person that he was fighting, we’d seen the film on them, the way that this guy would attack, he would shoot in the same way every time. And he was so powerful when he would shoot that if a person tried to sprawl or adapt, he could just blow right through it. And that’s the way my fighter was trained. So for the three months leading up to that, we would do the Tobacco protocol with one defense that was specific to that attack. And then with that mildly adrenalized state. And again, what did we focus on? I want you to be present.
09:30
in all of this, even if you get taken down, I want you to be present. And then after that four minutes, but that might’ll adrenaline, I state now we could correct it. We videotaped it and we only did it once during the day, once in the evening when he was fresh, and then we would let it go. And in two weeks he had that ingrained in him. So that was his only default. So that’s again, the power of deliberate practice and the power that highly adrenaline state, not to the point where he’s going to get his head ripped off, but to a point where there are stakes in their skin in the game, right? Yep.
09:59
It’s driving me nuts right now. My daughter plays volleyball and she just is a ninth grader. She just made their school, their high school here, one state last year. So it’s a great volleyball program. And that’s what she’s really into. Congratulations. What position does she play? She plays middle. Awesome. And in driving me nuts because the coach is giving them 30, 45 minutes of hard conditioning before skills drills and it’s backwards and I’m not going to say anything, but it’s not the ideal way to train. You should do your skills first conditioning second.
10:28
I agree. I’ve got a 19 year old stepdaughter that had played volleyball since she was in seventh grade. And she was a medal and she was a striker too. So and I absolutely agree. And that’s what we would do at the beginning of this person’s practice, we would warm them up lightly, and then go through that Tabata. And then after the two weeks after it was ingrained to corroborate your point from earlier, then I did it near the end of their evening, when they were tired when they were fatigued. And they were still able to hit it maybe about 75% of the time. And that showed me
10:58
when they got there. Now, this is an isolated specific incident. It’s not dynamic with everything else within the fight, but if that is the initial exchange and that’s the initial contact, that at least gives them a fighting chance to survive, to get through it. Because if they don’t believe that they can do it or if they hesitate in a fight, if you feel like you’re one step behind, you’re usually two or three. And I imagine surfing is the same way, especially with the high levels that you’re talking about where you’re like, oh, I should be adapting to this.
11:24
And at that point, now you’re already behind and you’re trying to catch back up. So I think that that’s important with the skills as well. And if a person’s fatigued and they’re doing that, trying to do this skill, like you said, of course what’s gonna happen, they’re fatigued, now the skill is going to be compromised. And now their belief in that skill or their belief in themselves in doing this skill is being subconsciously held back as opposed to if you would allow them to do that when they weren’t tired, for example. Or they’re reinforcing bad habits and bad technique. That’s it. Yep. That’s exactly it. And that doesn’t help them get to the next level.
11:54
And especially on a team sport, because what we were talking about was sort of individualized things, but again, with the team sport, the dynamics of what that does, the dynamics of what that does to their enthusiasm, the fact that this person can’t break down, yeah, this person, the center sits up perfectly. And this person can’t get it across the net without hitting the net. You lose belief. Now they’re not going to set this person any longer. Now the middle is no longer going to be a position of power. So a little volleyball talk for all of you guys that are not volleyball dads out there. So can you tell us a little bit about.
12:20
What led you to this specific path you mentioned earlier about your childhood, about the go-karts being this feeling, this excitement, because a lot of times the people that I find like in your level where they have this expertise, there’s a lot of things that sort of had to happen to lead to this path, but it gives you this very specific, powerful knowledge in this arena. So out of college, I got a job in software development sales and it was kind of the ideal job to get out of college.
12:48
paid well, working around a lot of smart people, tech feel, and it was the worst thing I’d ever done. I could not sit still. I would drink so much beer just to be hungover enough to sit there all day. I’d have my wife drive me to work so I couldn’t leave because the waves were good. I’d just leave or just beautiful day. I’d want to go fish. I just, I couldn’t sit there. And it’s actually kind of a funny story because it was a non-commission based sales job. And I was the low guy on the totem pole, fresh out of.
13:17
my numbers were good. Even with how bad I was at doing my job, my numbers were good, really good. So I just kept slacking more and more and more. And they kept giving me a lot of rope because my numbers were good. And then finally, they offered me like a really good position, six figures when I was 24, 23, 24, 23, when I was 23, it was going to be amazing. And I went home and I just saw it as a trap. I thought about it that night and I was like, I do this.
13:46
I’m going to buy stuff and then I’m going to be stuck in this. I went in the next day and I quit. And that was probably the most pivotal moment for me in my life because that allowed me then just to start chasing my dreams. And so I’ve always been a big reader and I just took the next six, eight months. I just went into a hole and just read and just followed things that I like to do. And ended up starting another little company. And then an opportunity came for us to move to Costa Rica. I’d started a couple of businesses in St.
14:16
actually the surf station store, which is the number one, it’s the biggest channel islands distributor, which is one of the huge surfboard brands. And it was my idea to start their online store. And so built that out. And then that gave me a window into, wait a second, I could build something like this. So we went to Costa Rica and I built something. Instead of selling surfboards though, we did property and development, better margins and property. Yeah, a lot better margin. And so we did that. And then
14:44
That’s when I got really serious into surfing and it wasn’t until probably 10 years ago when I hurt my back really badly, I guess when I was a kid, but then progressively deteriorated. I have a spondylolisthesis and pars fracture and I’m about a 40, 50% slip. So I should have had spinal fusion probably 12, 13 years ago. And I’ve been able to keep it quite good with foundation training. Shout out to Eric Goodman, who’s an absolute legend, good friend. And he’s helped me over the years with.
15:13
all these different ways to train, to keep my back strong. And it finally got to a point though, where shortboarding was no longer my thing. And so I started looking at standup surfing because it could help me train. And so that was the first time when I was getting into standup, I decided to deliberately take on a sport with an objective. And so I took on standup surfing. My objective was to win the national championship in two years. And so that was a really fun process. So that’s when I started actually learning to learn.
15:44
Up until that point, I was always obsessed with the things that I did and compulsive about what I did, but there wasn’t much tact to it. And then about 10 years ago, when I started studying the learning process, it was amazing. I wish I could go back and apply all this when I was a kid. And it’s what I’m trying to teach my kids now is how they can save themselves a lot of time and floundering by knowing how to get good at things. But yeah, that’s what really changed my life was when I took that on and then saw
16:13
the improvement and then you get better at learning. And it was fun to switch from paddle surfing into foil surfing because I am now much better at learning and creating systems for myself to learn than I was when I took on paddle surfing. I was learning to learn at that point. And then I used all of those lessons to apply to paddle surfing and now it’s just the growth rate’s been so much faster and it’s really cool to have gone through this again. And that’s what the podcast that I do is about is the journey of
16:42
It started right when I started foil surfing. I was like, I’m going to take on foil surfing. I’m going to track the journey with these interviews and then track my progress at the same time. So it’s been a fun thing. And then I coached along the way and do a bunch of other stuff. And I’d like to point out as a coach, they say in the martial arts, when one teach to learn. So as a coach, you can actually become a better practitioner of whatever it is you’re coaching, if you’re coaching courageously, if you’re doing the right thing, if you’re still trying to apply that same standard to yourself as you coach, because you’re coaching a skill.
17:12
And if the person’s doing it incorrectly and now they suffer a consequence, they wipe out or whatever it is that reinforces to both of us. But I’ve had experiences as martial arts instructor where I would teach a class and every single person to the person was doing the technique with something incorrect. And I’m like, how? And I would go through and correct each one of them. And then I would realize it was because I was doing it incorrectly. And now I’ve transferred that onto all of them, onto their hard drives. So it keeps us very responsible and it makes us very aware of what’s going on.
17:41
And one of the things that we talked about via Instagram was this idea, this understanding of the dynamic between the coach and the client or the student and this understanding of it’s not enough just to know the skillset. It’s not enough just to be able to communicate, but to understand the nature of that student, to understand what their default is, to understand what their natural tendencies are. So if they’re aggressive and you ask them to do something aggressive, you know that they’re going to do that. So we have to.
18:08
caution them to throttle back initially. If it’s a person who’s not very courageous, then we have to be even more supportive in that endeavor to get them to want to embrace that characteristic. Yep. And one thing talked about learning through coaching, something else I should mention is that I’ve had, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some folks who are very talented at what they do. And I have learned so much through that. I have been the net winner.
18:37
through the folks that I get to coach, which is very cool. I think that they’re happy with it too, but from my side, it’s been just incredible to work with people that are much better at doing things and at learning than you are. I just happen to have a key skillset in one thing that’s small, but their worlds are much more broad than mine. But I think that the people that you’re alluding to had a small skillset in a small niche area initially, and then they were able to sort of stack those like you were saying, find those to come together. Yeah, and we can talk about Josh a little. Josh Wadskin is someone that I work with
19:07
Actually, I wouldn’t say work with anymore. Josh and I started out, he was coming to Costa Rica to learn, but now we’re just really good friends and spend a lot of time in the water together and talk about foiling nonstop. But Josh has really guided my journey over the last, I don’t know, seven, eight years through insightful nuggets when they’re needed. He’s got a very cool way of doing that. And he’s an insane learner. Like what he’s been able to do in the last couple of years in foiling has been incredible. And at some point he may be.
19:35
He’s a recluse, but at some point he’ll probably post a video of him on a 50 foot wave on oil. That would be amazing. We’d love to see that. I know that he’s very much like you said, a recluse and he comes out occasionally to do your podcast or Tim’s podcast periodically. And that’s about it. And then he goes back. But again, he cultivates that empty space intentionally so that he can have these pockets to really dive deep. And I understand that what we do, some of the social media is sort of a necessary evil, but being able to do what he does and just kind of pull away from everything.
20:05
And again, for those that don’t know Josh, his background in chess as a young man, searching for Bobby Fisher and stuff that kind of changed the dynamic of his relationship and the love and passion that he had for chess. So he doesn’t want that to, I’m imagining he doesn’t want that to spoil what he’s enjoying currently with foiling and surfing. Right. And something else that he talks about a good bit, and we battle about this a little bit, we battle about the evils or benefits of social media.
20:31
And I am much more pro social. I have a lot of problems with social media, but I’m much more pro social media, especially in a sport like foil surfing, which is very new. You are able to get an access to the best guys in the world through what they’re doing and then through talking to them online. And it’s a collective that is helping to grow the sport. If you look at what’s happened over the last year and foil surfing, it wouldn’t have happened without social media. Because a guy in Brazil.
21:01
We’ll do something and then everyone’s training to do it the next week. And if you look back 20, 30 years and surfing the evolution, the iterative process was much slower rat boy would do an air on California and the video would come out, but it would be six months later. So the California group, the guys that surfed with him on a daily basis would be working on something that no one else even knew existed yet, but in the world that we live in now.
21:25
As soon as something happens, everybody knows it exists. And so everyone can try and see the level changing. So that’s the benefit. The evil is, this is his argument on this. And I think it’s a true one as well. And I’ve started incorporating it. I just did four months without an Instagram post. And the idea is that when you do, even if it’s unconsciously, when you have followers and there is this collective moving in a direction, you can’t help.
21:54
but fall in line with that. And so that’s gonna stifle your personal growth because you’re gonna be looking to get the new clip to showcase what you’re doing, which is competitive in the realm of what everyone else is doing. And so you’re less likely to go and explore something new. And so, you know, I just did four months in a hole without really any interaction online. And the growth during that four months was by far my best four months yet. And so now I’ve got a whole new…
22:22
approach to what I’m doing. And now I’m out there again, a little bit, but I’ll probably go into another hole. As soon as I feel the plateau, it’s going to be cut off again. And then I’ll go through this process again. It’s a beautiful one. And it’s Josh’s idea. These little micro sessions, it gives you that space to have this little micro session of creativity and attachment. And then you come back and it’s almost like intellectual sprinting in some ways, you have that Tabata, so to speak, where you’re going through, because without a deadline time means nothing. So having this place where
22:50
You know that you have this empty space. You don’t feel this need to do those. And I feel the same way I try to put out quality content, but trying to do something every single day, that’s just not going to happen. And also some of my message, like a lot of people really love that warrior, hard truth punching the face kind of stuff, but there’s so much more to cultivating what we’re talking about to be multifaceted and all these dimensions, but for whatever reason, people like to put you in a box and they say, this is the ex-veteran, the guy that got
23:20
killed and blah, blah, blah. Well, there’s a lot of stuff you learn in the process, but that’s why this conversation to me is powerful because it shows there’s a lot more to it than just saying, Hey, suck it up. That’s the bare minimum. If anything, hopefully that will get through to them and now they can take these additional nuggets that we’re talking about, or maybe take some time to themselves to where they break away and aren’t concerned about notifications or followers or likes or any of that vanity metrics that in the end.
23:48
necessarily make you a better practitioner of whatever it is you’re trying to, whatever your endeavor is. I think the risk is that you start believing in the box, or you start identifying with the box. And that’s something that’s interesting that happened to me is that, so the business that I had in Costa Rica was a small town in Costa Rica, Nassauro, which is becoming a much bigger town now. And I had built a company there that was a fairly, I mean, it was a big fish in a small pond. And I had not realized.
24:17
that a lot of who I thought I was was caught up in what I had done in NoSara for a decade. All your personal relationships start to transform around who you are. Then I sold the company, and there were a few relationships that started to change. That was an interesting feeling when relationships started to change because I no longer wielded the same power that I had before.
24:46
And when we moved back to Florida, it went from being big fish in a small pond to a nobody in a huge pond in Jacksonville here. And that was a really weird thing for me for a little while, you know, like you couldn’t walk down the street in a sara without four people. Like saying hi or knowing what you had done. And here you’re just a ghost and it shouldn’t have bothered me. And it made me go in and really examine why that was important to me, where that had come from and do some work to try to figure out without any.
25:15
external, I guess when you walk through a community like that, there is, I’m sure it happens in a high school or in a college or on a team, you identify with how people respond to you. And I think it’s important to realize that you have nothing to do with how people respond to you, because it’s completely superficial. You should be proud of what you’ve done, but it shouldn’t have that much control over how you think about yourself. No, it absolutely does. And it’s the same thing. When you were interviewing Anders, you made a comment about how
25:44
way that we perform around our peers influences us. And you were talking about a physical performance capacity, but it’s similar to what you were just discussing, financial performance or the impact on the local community. That’s the performance. But so when you came back to that place where you were sort of a ghost, there was this feeling of maybe emptiness, I don’t know, maybe not as much excitement, but were you able to channel that inwards towards what you’re working towards now? Or how long did you kind of stay in that place where you felt
26:13
like you weren’t getting the accolades that you wanted. I don’t think it was about accolades as much as it was about how in a small place like that, how much your place in whatever system you’re in dictates how people are responding to what you’re doing and realizing that the world that I was a fishbowl, the world that I was living in, right? And so you spend your time and be like if you transfer to high schools, probably very similar type of thing.
26:42
And you just mentioned something else there that I thought, oh, so when we move back, and this is something that I’m a big believer in, and it’s something that I don’t know how many people do very often, but it is playing the hand you’re dealt. And the idea there is, and maybe this is something you talk about or think about, but I think we’re pretty bad at assessing frequently where we’re at, either in circumstance or in skillset. And a lot of people get stuck
27:11
I’ve done this at times, you get stuck in a direction and you just head that direction just because you’re going that direction, even though your skill set might now be much more in line with a new direction or a new opportunity. It was something I had thought about a lot. Then when we had to abruptly move back to Florida, it was something I got to practice. Where am I now and what can I do? Then creating the best opportunity from that situation.
27:38
Yeah, and I think that’s a pretty cool thing to do. I always try to self assess either quarterly, annually, or every few years and see if there’s something better, more fun that you could be doing. I agree. And you sent me some ideas when we were talking on IG, you were saying that that’s how you kind of adapted to adversity. You see it as this opportunity, as this gift, and you say, okay, now that I’m here, what new skills can I apply or what new opportunities are in this environment with the skills that I’ve either newly acquired or that I had at one point?
28:08
It is easy for us to go down the path of least resistance because it’s familiar, because we’re already good at it. But the real question is not if we can do it, it’s are we doing it for the right reasons, right? That’s a big one for me is are you doing what’s making you truly happy? And that’s one of the things that I have seen positive changes in folks who have realized that they’ve gotten stuck in a place where they’re not living their true happiness. And it’s amazing what happens when you do.
28:37
Like as soon as you start making decisions based on things you truly love to do, everything gets very easy. Maybe not financially, but the financial part generally will come too, if you just do it enough from what I have seen in my limited scope. But it’s almost like what we were talking about on Instagram and in regards to adversity is I think sometimes when you hit a wall of adversity, there’s a seam somewhere else that has opened up where the water is just going to keep flowing around whatever that rock is. And sometimes it’s best to go through it.
29:06
because maybe it’s character building, but maybe there’s an opportunity to the right or the left that could make things a lot easier for you. I couldn’t agree more. When I was injured, I was injured for months in a bed and I’m pushing against this thing, trying to overcome it. And I’m mad and I’m a victim and I pissed off at everybody around me. But then I realized that, okay, well, I can’t overcome this thing just by facing it head on. So in surfing or in martial arts, if you have something big like the ocean pushing into you, I can’t resist it.
29:35
I have no other choice but to turn into it or to blend with it or at least find that opportunity. And if you have an opponent that’s bigger than you pushing in and you go with them, you create just that small gap, just that seam. And now, like you said, now you can find the way to either circumvent it. You don’t have to be a hero and try to go right through it all the time, but you have to be willing to have the humility to not necessarily be right, just be willing to learn, be willing to suspend whatever your beliefs were.
30:04
to go to this new place because again, without that adversity pushing you, you never would have seen it from that vantage point any other way. It has to change your entire paradigm, which is what you did when you move back. And now you’re on this incredible path, not only for your own mastery, but to help the mastery of others in the process. Incredibly fun journey. Thinking about the space, something about the ocean as you’re talking about that. And one of the beautiful things probably in martial arts, do you Jiu-Jitsu?
30:32
Jiu-Jitsu, lots of martial arts I’ve done since I was 11, but they all have that kind of flow component for sure. Sure. So there’s a humbling factor of the ocean. The ocean just doesn’t care. It doesn’t care what kind of car you drove up in, how much money you spent on your surfboard. If you’re in the wrong spot, you’re going to get leveled. And I think that’s one of the most beautiful things is people leave the ocean with a more grounded feeling. And it’s also beautiful because everyone’s on the same level. And everyone.
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is on the same level in the eyes of the ocean, but the work that you’ve put in, he’s going to allow you to deal with situations in a different way. But I think you find that same feeling and. Absolutely. I’ve trained in places where the training partner that you have as a CEO of a billion dollar company, and then you have a person who’s barely able to make rent, but you put them together. And like you said, the martial art doesn’t care. The skill comes out. If you have it, it works. And if you do not, it doesn’t matter how you feel or how offended you are.
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That should be the humbling effect. And again, humility is based on learning and for better or for worse, pain and discomfort are often the best teachers if we’re not willing to learn on our own. So it keeps us very honest. And then even like you were mentioning before, when that person comes into like a 60 foot wave, seeing that can inspire us and that shows us what is possible as opposed to being in this place where it’s like, okay, I feel as if.
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I should be at this place already. It’s like, no, you haven’t put in the work, you haven’t had the deliberate practice. And for whatever reason, you’re not there yet. But it doesn’t mean that we’re a lesser of a person, lesser of a practitioner. It just shows us that we have more opportunities because that person didn’t just get there as well. They had to do the time and do the work. That’s one of the things that I am, one of my main goals in parenting is helping my kids to understand how much time goes in to becoming truly good at something.
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And I think once you understand that, it’s the same, the same amount of work, the same amount of time, no matter where you go. But if you don’t understand how hard it’s going to be to get really good at something, then you probably never do. You never have that ability to get good at things. Getting good at something is a skillset in and of its own self. And it’s been one of my biggest goals is getting the kids to, to truly embody that, which sometimes feels like they’re doing it. Like you said, they’re 11 and 13, right? 12 and 14.
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12 and 14. So yeah, they’re still learning obviously in that process. And of course, they don’t have enough lifespan to have had that, but you’re putting them on that path and understanding that it will take a long time and that it will be hard, ironically makes it less difficult because you understand that this is part of the process. It’s not as if you’re just going to get there overnight. And here’s the reality. If we got something easily and we acquired it without a lot of work, we wouldn’t respect it nearly as much. We wouldn’t value it nearly as much.
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And then we wouldn’t be able to accomplish as nearly as much in a positive capacity with that skill set. People don’t respect what they don’t pay for in some capacity, whether it be monetarily, physically, time, emotion, etc. Agree completely. I think that’s so powerful. And even with the 10,000 repetitions idea, I’ve taught people that have done, you know, I’ve done this martial art for 20 years, but yet you see them throw the technique. And because they haven’t had deliberate practice with that technique, they’ve done it 10,000 times incorrectly now. Now they have this bad habit.
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And I’m sure you’ve seen this a thousand times with clients as well, where they go through and now they think that they had this thing. And then when you show them the phone, either they turn in and they learn, or they allow this cognitive dissonance to sort of justify the behavior. You do see that a lot. The iterative process of video is the best thing for training. And then the other thing that’s really important is being able to, and maybe this is the same way in martial arts too, you have to create
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and understanding between what you’re seeing on video and how something feels. In the surf world, they’re generally very, everyone feels like they surf like Kelly Slater. You come in and you look at the video and you’re off by an exponential factor. But as you break down more and more and more video, you start to be able to map that pretty quickly. And that’s a skill in and of itself. And so at this point with how much video I’ve broken down, I can be in the middle of a turn and know
34:56
by how the turn feels, where the positioning is off and correct. And if whatever you’re doing, and I do this, I produced a podcast this morning that I did with a buddy yesterday and I was listening to the podcast and there were two things I picked out that I was like, I don’t like how I do this here. And so you just make a note of that. And now I’ll catch myself the next time I do that. And I think that that’s just a way of life. Like once you start bringing.
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deliberate practice and in some places, I don’t know if I call it deliberate practice, but once you bring in that framework of self-assessment into what you’re doing, you can’t help but get better because you start noticing little things all the time and whatever you’re doing. I absolutely agree. When I had my TEDx, it was similar where I’d spoke before, obviously, but when you have a timeframe and you have to tell them exactly what you’re going to say, you send it in because a lot of speakers like to be intellectually lazy.
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where they’re like, oh, how long do I get to speak? Okay. And then they just sort of meander, but that’s not respectful to the person that’s putting on the event or the audience, frankly, in my opinion. Our job should be to give as much value as we can to those people that are there in the seats of that time. Having said that, the understanding forced me to have that, okay, I have to be in this amount of timeframe. This is what I said I was going to say. How can I deliver it in a way? So as you said, I would videotape myself as I perform it to get better. Am I moving too much?
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Am I not pausing here? Am I too quick? Am I taking away from what I’m trying to say? Do I really need to say that at this point? And that’s how we get better. But within those areas, that’s when we learn the most about ourselves. Again, it’s like that mirror that everybody else right there. It’s not going to lie. It’s not trying to make us feel bad, but it’s not going to make us feel good either if we’re not doing the work. Did you have other folks break down the video with you? I did not, because at that time I was still teaching full time. I was trying to finish my book and literally I would work on it before I would start.
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And then I would work on it at the end of the evening. And that was it. I did look at what other people were saying when they would speak. And I was like, I like this. I don’t like this. And then you have to get to that place. This may sound off to people, but because it was almost like a script, I had to memorize it, internalize it, get to the point where I was like breathing so that I could get full circle to where I could put the emotion into it, as opposed to just trying to memorize a script and say something.
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because I knew that I had to, I only had one chance to do this. And when you have all the cameras, all the lights, and it’s time to go, either you rise or you fall. So like you said, I critique myself very harshly that I’ll say that. So in that moment, when you did the speech, that would be considered a very deep flow state. Absolutely. Lots of consequences, social consequence, intellectual consequence, your brand, the whole thing. How did it change the feeling? And what do you remember from doing that? It’s interesting. So,
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People think that when you have 3000 people in an arena that you are going to be able to see everybody, you can’t. You’re going to have lights all in your face. You’re not going to be able to see beyond the front row. And again, just like with anything, there’s what you hope happens, there’s what you plan for and then there’s what happens when you’re in the water. There’s all kinds of things that change. So on TED, they don’t want you to get beyond the red dot. So you can’t move around a lot. For me, there was technical difficulty with the slides. So I had to know the material well. I had to be emotionally invested in this thing. I had to be projecting.
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all of my energy into it. And then when the slide stuck, instead of like freaking out and just manic me trying to hit it and go past where I needed to go, I had to be able to do that and still stay within the presence of that flow and continue forward with it. So in that moment, and I’m trying to get to a point here on flow that I think is pretty interesting that you’re giving the speech, were you hearing your voice talking to you as far as directions on top of the speech, or were you just fully in the speech at the moment? I was just in it at the moment. Okay.
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So like the last level of the flow state is what I call the director. And it’s a very cool state to where, so you go from conscious action to unconscious action. And then the last step I think is unconscious action to where you’re unconsciously doing things while you’re consciously directing that action. And it’s a very cool thing that I’ve been able to get to in a few places and I talked to other athletes about, and it’s
39:13
You’re not having any input on how technique is being done, but you’re saying this is what I’m going to do here and planning things out. So it’s almost like you’re operating in this weird bilateral universe where things are just happening. It’s like you’re controlling a character in a video game almost. It’s a very cool feeling. I was going to say that there was some of that, especially with that component. There were a couple of other technical things that happened. So, like you said, it’s almost like you’re outside of yourself.
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sort of watching yourself perform this. And when I was done with it and I bowed and they clapped, I stepped off stage and I took the mic off and I felt like I had left something out because it had flowed so easily, because it was so efficient. I felt like I had left a part out. And then because they time you, they have the timer right there, they have the monitor in front of you, they have your current slide, they have your previous slide. And that was another thing too, both of those monitors went out. So I have no time if I’m over time, under time. But again.
40:07
because you practice it so often, you have a pretty good idea of where you’re at. And because it seemed to go so quickly, but that was because I was in an adrenalineized state and then for Ted’s, you don’t see those for like four or five months afterwards. So you have a lot of time to stew to wonder. And of course everybody’s say, Hey, you did a great job, but it’s again, best them us as the critic looking at ourselves. No, how was it? Did I do the right thing? Did I forget a point trying to make this impact? And if I leave something out, then.
40:37
That’s the difference between sometimes changing somebody’s life and just sounding like everybody else. How did that state feel to you versus your more intense states? You were you a seal? I was not a seal. I was in the light infantry. I was in Marshall. Oh yeah. So during those states, it’s different. There’s a lot of other factors when you’re in the infantry preparing. There’s a lot of fatigue. There’s a lot of additional stresses with this. I didn’t feel physical fatigue. I felt the excitement, but I was able to channel it because I had been prepared.
41:05
But I believe that’s where a lot of people, when they’re introduced to a highly adrenalized state and they don’t have the skill set or they don’t have the belief in it, then that’s what inhibits them. And then that slows them down. And now they’re either not able to catch up or they are just feel like they’re running through mud trying to get to that next place. And by then everything kind of becomes a very slow train wreck in the process. I don’t know if that makes sense or not, or if that answers your question. It does.
41:31
I’m very fascinated by how people experience these states. Because I think that we all experience them a little differently based on neurochemistry or past experience. And there’s certain people that seem to really need it in their lives. I am one of them. And a lot of my friends, most of my friends are those guys who kind of have to do something pretty epic every day just to feel normal. I’m one of those guys. And like you were saying as well, Bruce Lee said this. He says, I don’t hit.
42:01
He says it hits all by itself. So when you had that skillset of that unconscious capacity, again, when I would fight, if the guy drops his hands, sometimes my hand would already come out and hit them in the face before I even realized I was doing it, it was coming back or you’re hitting the arm bar, you’re transitioning to the triangle just because you feel the opening because you’ve been trained to do that. But then there’s the higher levels that you’re talking about where it’s like, it’s beyond just that it’s this ability to have the emotional investment with it.
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not hesitate in the process, but also to be completely fully conscious of it as it’s occurring, that all resonates. That was part one of my interview with Eric Antonson, host of the Progression Project podcast and two-time national Costa Rican paddle surfing champion. You can hear part two of our interview on the next episode of OctoNomverba, where Eric returns to discuss how to become your own coach through deliberate and intentional practice, lessons that Eric has learned from the legendary P Performance coach, Josh Waitzkin.
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and learning how to play the hand that you’re dealt when facing adversity. Until next time, live a life of actions, not words.
